#i want to go and just sit on a hill in letterkenny and cry

[handweavers]

i haven't ever actually been to ireland despite being technically a citizen but i was raised by a man from letterkenny and in his old age his memories of ireland are the strongest and so he talks at length about the geography of the north and all the little towns and villages he used to spend time in both in donegal and derry and together we recite the names of the rivers and lakes and mountains across donegal and i got him some prints of paintings of malin head and lough swilly and the beaches at portrush and i feel like i know that entire area like the back of my hand even though, again, i have never once stepped foot there. i have been there countless times with him in his memories and seen it all through his eyes but i will never see them with him in person. images of the geography and towns around letterkenny and derry often come to me in dreams and i can picture the main street in letterkenny and the royal school at raphoe where he went because he couldn't afford the lodgings at trinity in dublin or foyle college in derry (and even still, his scholarship was paid by one of the anglican priests at the raphoe diocese because he couldn't afford to board in raphoe either) and i can picture all of it as it looked in the 1940s so clear in my mind