So what if all my daydreams were pointless? The next morning, the question didn’t bother me as much. I resisted the urge to attribute some kind of significance to it all. My train was at 8:20AM. Let’s just hop on and go, no one forcing me, well aware of the pointlessness–the way I had since Beijing.
When I stepped out of the hostel at 7:00AM, no one was around and the streets were still quiet. Everything–from the cracks on the sidewalk to the subway signs–marked how far I had come. The only thing audible in the quiet of the morning streets was the dry sound of fallen leaves crunching beneath my steps. By 8:00AM, I was back at Euston station, where I bought some more bread and water and boarded the train. The final trip toward Dublin was underway. The plan for the day was to get off the train at Crewe, a city near the Wales border, at around 11:00AM. At Crewe, I would take another train to cross into Wales and arrive at a place called Holyhead by 1:40PM. From Holyhead, I was going to take a ferry at around 2:45PM, arriving in Dublin by around 6:00PM. There was plenty of time between transports and all the steps had already been mapped out. I just sat back and idly watched the serene landscape outside the window for the entire train ride.
The train uneventfully passed through vast commons where animals were grazing peacefully. There were some regional towns, but mostly the scenery consisted of open fields full of tranquil sunlight. As I traveled farther, things were slowly but noticeably changing. At Crewe, I switched to a smaller train which had all this Welsh writing on the outside. Even the displays inside the train and the announcements were in Welsh, which I had never read or heard being spoken. The train glided through the Welsh countryside warmed by the afternoon sunlight. But gradually, clouds formed and the sky began to turn gray. There were still patches of sunlight that created silver linings at first, but even they disappeared in time. Everything turned gray and stayed that way. The empty and dull surroundings took me back to the train ride through western Azerbaijan, only with forests and rivers instead of the dry steppes.
By the time the train arrived at Holyhead, the sky had turned so gray that it looked like it was going to rain at any moment. There was nothing much to do near the center of the town, nor did I have time to venture farther from the town center. I headed straight to the ferry terminal, which was right next to the station, and joined a small line. The gates were already open and passengers were boarding. When it was my turn in line, I asked the staff whether I could sit by the window. She chuckled and said that there were no seats on the ferry. Feeling embarrassed by the silly question, I just asked back, “Oh, really?” and the staff said with a smile, “Yeah, it’s a big boat.”
After some time, a bus came and hauled passengers directly onto the ferry. The ship was so big that I didn’t even know that we were already on it until I got off the bus. It had no seats and instead had large open areas with a bunch of shops and restaurants. I walked around and didn’t know where to sit. All the restaurants, bars, and cafes were busy, and the tables had already been taken. I was an odd duck, roaming around with a giant backpack with a large plastic water bottle fitted on the side. I climbed some stairs and passed through several crowded floors until I randomly reached an open deck at the top.
By this time, the sky was even gloomier, and the rain was drizzling all over the deck. The ferry was slowly pulling away from the dock. The large funnels on the deck exhaled thick clouds of gray steam which were quick to blend into the spray of rain and disappeared without a trace. On one side of the ferry, I could see a long and narrow breakwater jutting out into the water, but anything beyond that narrow strip of land was just a blur, obscured by gray fog and rain. As I walked around the empty and wet floor, raindrops continued to land incessantly on my shoulders and the hood, picking up the intensity every minute. I didn’t mind the rain. It made everything feel real. What began as mere daydreams was now as real as the drizzling rain and wind blowing from the gray sea. I thought about the naive beginning of the trip and all the intense doubts that used to consume me. I had finally come to terms with them.
It was getting pretty cold to stand around and the rain started falling even more heavily. Since I didn’t want to stay soaked for the next few hours on the ship, I retreated back inside. After walking around the bustling restaurants and cafes once more, I managed to find a seat somewhere near the window. The window was wet with drops of water, and I couldn’t tell whether they were from the rain or the spray of the waves angrily breaking against the ship’s hull–they were probably from both. The daylight grew sparser as the ship sailed farther into the churning sea. In the evening, the sea looked more menacing and I could no longer discern where the sea ended and the dim sky began. I was hungry and thirsty, and my head began to hurt. In that blank moment, I realized one thing. For the first time since leaving Sydney, I was tired. I don’t mean I was fatigued–it was different. It was a feeling that I was prepared to move on. I was ready to go home, and maybe do some normal things for a while. I was ready for Seattle.
Eventually night took over the sky, and I had no clue where we were because nothing was really visible outside the window and the deck was closed. I couldn’t really look up the current location because there was no free Internet on the ship. But it wasn’t long before I could vaguely make out some lights on the far side of the water. As passengers one by one began filing toward the exits, I managed to walk out onto the wet floor of the side deck to have a better look at the lights. In the distance ahead, a vast stretch of shoreline was glowing. It was a flat skyline dotted with red, white, and orange night lights. The lights flickered, indifferent and unreachable, neither getting closer nor farther. It was Dublin.
At some point, a dark silhouette of a long breakwater appeared on the side, and the ship slowly sailed alongside it. The shoreline was now visibly closer and the shapes of the buildings emerged faintly. At the end of the breakwater, the ship stopped and made a sharp turn into the docks, pulling very slowly next to a humongous container ship and giant cranes busy unloading all sorts of containers. The arrival was pretty unceremonious. The ship came to a full stop and sat there for a while. A bus hauled the passengers to a nearby office where everyone showed their IDs to an officer who then casually let them through.
There was a bit of a holdup when it was my turn, though. The officer didn’t really know what to make of my unusual itinerary. When I told the officer I was coming from London, he looked a bit confused and flipped through the passport. He remarked, “It says you left Paris yesterday.” “Oh right,” I added, “I got to London from Paris.” Eyes still on the passport, the officer then asked, “How long were you in Paris for?” I was going to say I was there for almost two whole hours, but wasn’t sure how he would take the deadpan response. So I just said I didn’t really stay there because I was going through Paris from Budapest. All this left him quite puzzled, but the crux of the confusion came from a follow-up question about how long I would stay in Ireland. The officer didn’t seem to know how to process my honest reply, “I’m leaving tomorrow for Seattle.” With disbelief, he tried to summarize, “So you were in Budapest, Paris, London, now in Dublin, and you are leaving the country tomorrow?” I mean, when he put it like that, the whole thing did sound nonsensical. I didn’t know how to explain it, so what I went with was, “Yes, I just wanted to see Dublin.” Still doubtful, the officer reluctantly stamped the passport and just waved me through. He didn’t really understand what in the world I was doing. That made two of us.
I hopped on a bus toward downtown and changed to a tram to go to the hostel. People were just going about their normal evening routine, talking about things like where they went for a run or whose parties they were going to. No one really knew or cared about the fact that I had finally reached Dublin. And why would they? Even I didn’t know what to make of it. After dropping my stuff at the hostel, I headed out and roamed around the city that I had dreamt of reaching for so long. The wet cobblestone streets were packed with busy pubs and an unusual number of American flags. Christmas-themed decorations were everywhere and a joyous atmosphere was in the air.
Not a single person on those busy streets cared about the fact that I reached the end of my road. The downtown was bright and full of festivity, but it was precisely there that I felt lonely for the first time on the trip. It wasn’t about being by myself–I was used to that. I never felt lonely walking around the night streets of Bukhara, Baku, or Istanbul alone. Whatever I was feeling this time was about the burden of facing the pointless nature of what I was doing. I was no longer content with the explanation that my steps were meaningful because I took them. I was grasping for a clearer sense of why it all had to happen. If the past twenty-four days amounted to something because they were pointless, fine, but what was that? The indifference of everything around me made it clear that I alone was to bear the weight of that question. The streets were full of buzz but also felt dead silent.
Lonely or not, my arrival deserved some kind of ceremony. So I walked into a random pub and sat down in a corner with a pint of Guinness. I had Beijing Duck in Beijing, so why not a Guinness in Dublin to top it all off? The bar was packed and was full of regular things that one might find on a night out. Just people having a good time and a local musician banging out familiar tunes that everyone sang along to. I thought I wanted normalcy, but it wasn’t enough. What I really wanted was clarity–it wasn’t in that bar. It was getting too late anyway, so I thought I’d head back to the hostel and call it a night. I needed an early start in the morning because my flight to Seattle was at 4:30PM. I didn’t finish the pint and went back on the streets. The night was cold, but it wasn’t raining anymore. I lazily strolled along the banks of the river as it quietly yet rapidly flowed in the opposite direction.
On my way back, I mostly thought about questions that came to me upon arriving in London the night before. What did reaching Dublin really mean, and how did I feel about it? My hunch about the first question scared me, so I didn’t want to look at it then. But the second question about the feeling wasn’t all that difficult to answer. Reaching Dublin made me feel tired and lonely, for the first time since leaving home. I was tired in that I was ready to move on and do normal things for a while in Seattle. And I was lonely in the realization that no one could answer for me what meaning my steps amounted to. The night deepened, and the weight of the questions pushed me down, answered or not.