Carlisle

A Memory

April 27, 2025

Dear Smythe,

The summer before I moved to Dublin, before I even knew I would be moving, I drove up to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to visit my old university. It was a beautiful July day in 2022, the sun was shining, trees fresh with green leaves, but I felt no nostalgia driving into the little town. It was comfortable being there, but I was aware that it was a place that belonged in the past.

My first stop was Enzo, my old art professor. I took two classes with him my senior year, and he introduced me to my first genuine regret: that I had not elected to major in art in university. I parked behind the Goodyear building and wandered around the studio for at least ten minutes until I found him working away, in a room I thought I had checked already. He looked the same. A little older, a little less hair, but the same confidence combined with absentmindedness. Suddenly I began to feel unsure of why I was there. I felt like a fraud, someone who had dreamed of this world once but ended up tied to one I didn’t belong in. Lofty goals of artistic creation turned to seven years in corporate litigation. I wasn’t sure I could face telling him that. Perhaps this was a bad idea.

But before I could run away, he saw me.

“Marguerite!”

The uncertainty vanished and I was immediately glad I was there.

“Enzo! It’s so good to see you.”

Small talk quickly evolved to the resolution of our mutual problem. We were hungry.

“Wanna go to Bambino’s?”

We walked over to Carlisle’s famous pizza joint, which I had actually never been to as a student. I was poor back then, and what little money I did have went directly to my most important passion of the time: drinking.

We sat at a table and Enzo directed his forthright, nearly aggressive gaze at me. I had forgotten how a look from him forced one into honesty. He was both easy to be around and made one feel uncomfortable with the lies one told oneself. Or maybe that was just me.

“So, what’s going on?”

I told him. The years in law, how I dreamed of writing, my application to Trinity College Dublin which had accepted me for a MA in Creative Writing and then promptly turned around to tell me the acceptance was a mistake. Their rejection two months later. The week before, I’d seen a university in Dublin had openings left, so I chanced my arm and sent in an application, but I didn’t expect to get in. I was lost, I was miserable. I wasn’t sure what to do next.

To Enzo’s great credit, though faced with a despondent twenty-eight year old woman who actually didn’t have too much wrong going on in her life, he offered me good advice.

“You can still write,” he said. “You get vacation time, don’t you? Use it to take yourself somewhere and write.”

“But that’s vacation time,” I said.

“Exactly. Do you want to write or not?”

“Well, yes.”

“And what’s with all the drinking?” he said.

“What? I don’t drink that much.”

“Oh, come on. Every post I see on Instagram is cheers to this and a bottle of that.”

I didn’t know what to say. He was right but I wasn’t expecting him to be so direct. Or so honest. Sweet lies would have been preferable, especially from the teacher I had worshipped for years.

“I don’t think so,” I mumbled.

“Oh, come on,” he looked at me square in the eyes. I began to feel deeply ashamed. I couldn’t voice my answer to what he was asking – that I was so miserable that going out by myself and drinking at my friend’s bar a few nights a week was the highlight of my life these days and an excellent distraction from how lonely I felt.

“I had it different,” he said. “It was simpler because I had my wife, who was my girlfriend then. We lived together, shared costs, put ourselves through art school, and ended up doing what we wanted. It wasn’t easy but we could make it work.”

“There’s a singles tax,” I said. “Everything is more expensive when you’re single.”

“But you can still do it,” Enzo said. “You have a job. You get paid.”

“I feel like everything is harder, though. Because of how we were raised.”

I referenced what had made me connect with Enzo so much all those years before. Unlike almost everyone else I’d ever known, we shared one unusual thing in common.

I continued, “I feel like when you’re homeschooled, you don’t learn to be social. I tried to learn once I got to college, how you’re supposed to behave and everything. But it’s hard. It doesn’t come naturally to me, I don’t know how to do it.”

Enzo understood, I could see it. And then he told me what his childhood had been like – or some of it, at least. I won’t tell you, Smythe, because it is his story to tell and not mine. But I will tell you one thing. That day, I understood that my story could have been so much worse.

When he finished, I was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I said eventually. Or at least, I hope I did. Three years later, my memory has faded, but I hope to god that I said I was sorry.

Enzo shrugged, “It is what it is.”

“So you understand,” I said, some desperation within me. “You understand how difficult it is not to connect, not to understand the rules. When the world sees you as antisocial, everything is so much harder.”

Enzo furrowed his eyebrows. I wasn’t understanding something important.

“But who cares? There’s nothing wrong with being a little antisocial.”

I stared at him.

“Make your art. Be you. Who cares about fitting in?”

***

I have been thinking of this conversation so much recently, and three years later, I finally understand. Our strange upbringing, one that cut us off from the world and normality and the supposedly innate knowledge of what we are supposed to act like, gave Enzo and I a gift. Our curse is our greatest blessing, the ability to connect more deeply and truly with ourselves, and our art, and not to care what anyone else has to say about it.

After our lunch, I had a wonderful day. I wandered around the streets of Carlisle, visited my old flat, the bar I snuck into every night when I was twenty, and the restaurant I worked at which funded my ventures. I met my old Creative Writing professor, too, an Irishman named Darran who introduced me to Seamus Heaney and absolutely ripped my writing to shreds – and who was the first person to believe in it. My junior year, Darran had advised me upon graduating that I should move across the world, work odd jobs, experience life, and just write. When evening came, and I met the highway for my two-hour drive home, I felt satisfied.

One week later, DCU accepted me into its MA in Creative Writing. Eight weeks after that, my life packed away, I flew across the Atlantic to my new home. I didn’t understand the rules here, how people were meant to behave. Ireland has a remarkably different culture from the US. Our language is the same, but everything about how I was supposed to act was different. So, I gave up and just acted like myself. And for the first time in my life, I started to fit in. Or maybe I didn’t. Somewhere along the way, I realized I don’t really care.