June 2026
Non-Fiction
1.
My family has this idea of me formed as a picture taken at the height of puberty. All my obsessions and moods, traits and flaws crystal clear to the eye in their ugly forming. Despite the forming, which is ongoing, it is a whole image. They know it well, everything warm and cold about it.- But I am double that age now and their idea of me remains tied to that image. With each new year a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the original image is made and where the printer blurs or skips a section, they fill it in diligently. They buy me something Harry Potter related every Christmas. If I eat my dinner I'm told “that's a good dinner” implying congratulations, that I ate up and ate well. If I indulge in certain foods, a caesar salad, cucumbers, tomatoes, anything that isn't beige, they act surprised that I'm not a picky eater.
The truth is I haven't been a picky eater since I was a child.
They are just trying to know me. My face is a palimpsest of all the versions of me, the newest one only revealing herself. So I see it for what it is, despite my frustrations, even if it limits me. They are just trying to know me because to know someone, especially in their ugly formings, is to love them.
2.
When I think of being a child I do so now with the filter of being an adult. That is to say, time or memory or nostalgia has warped its way around my past to make it something that it is not. Who’s to say if that’s a good thing? If I were to look to the past through this lens and become tempted to lament a life I once lived then it would detract from the now. If I were to always carry the sharpness of what it is to grow and live it might also pain me.
Here instead is one memory, seared by physical pain, into my mind with absolute clarity. And yet, the first time I wrote about it I projected it into the life of a fictional character:
She roots through the plastic drawers in her room until she finds it, a small bottle of nail varnish, silver, glittery, perfect. She doesn’t tell anyone what she is doing. It’s a surprise. In the bathroom she locks the door, pulls the teal green footstool up to the sink and uses her knee to pull herself up onto the ceramic edge so that she can see herself in the mirror. She waits, balancing and then when she feels steady enough, opens the little jar of varnish. The brush is small, small enough that it perfectly fits on her nails when her mam helps her to paint them. She doesn’t need help now. She smiles at her own reflection. Having looked at the popstars on the telly and in magazines for weeks now, their eyes staring at her, their metallic eyelids sparkling. She takes the nail polish on the brush, leaning in close enough that her breath fogs the mirror and slowly begins to paint, the cold glitter varnish gliding over her purply venous lids. With one eye open, she glides the miniature brush back and forth, wondering why the glitter will not stay in place. She opens her eye to look at the effect and the varnish drips, one gelatinous blob, into her eye. In an instant she knows it was a mistake. She knows why she snuck up the stairs, locked the door and refused to mention what she was doing to anyone. Her eye blurs, screaming into acidic pain and she is down on the footstool, down onto the floor, holding her face. Using the tap she splashes cold water on her eyelids before forcing the eye open, rinsing it out and all the time thinking, this was so stupid, I can’t tell anyone…I can’t see, what if I can’t see…Eventually, the burning subsides, she blinks and blinks and blinks as her reflection in the mirror shifts, becoming clear. She goes downstairs and continues to watch MTV, watching the pop stars with their long hair, flat stomachs and eyes that sparkle unnaturally. Her palms feel clammy, her stomach knotted but she swallows this mistake and hopes it will go away. She is seven years old. She just wants to be pretty.
By writing about it in the third person I somehow removed some of the filter with which I see the past. I remember the teal green footstool, plastic with a rough textured surface. I remember it because it remained in the house until we sold it, long past my childhood. The bathroom that I remember is really a dreamlike mishmash of the bathrooms of my childhood home - all of which feel true to me but can’t all be true at once. This truth only exists in the landscape of my memories. And I think, and have always thought, I have a great memory.
To some extent I’ll happily let time work its magic on a memory. Memories, like my parents’ understanding of me, are a daisy chain of the last time we recalled a thing precariously threaded onto the time before that and before that until the seed of the memory can be found.
3.
Sometimes now a place alone unlocks to me the understanding that I am in a memory as it is forming. It is June and I find myself on the island of my childhood summer holidays, in the pocket of my parents even though I am an adult. It is my second time here this month, one of many visits in my life. At the graveyard on a clear evening, my father cuts a known path between the graves and I follow along the downtrodden grass. We make three stops in the old graveyard and I'm diligently shown who rests where. Told, again for the second time this month, one of many times in my life, who is who and who they are to me. He does mental maths to tell me that they were born in various years 1912, 1898. And while I'm a history teacher these years and dates seem incomprehensible to my family and life, despite being essential to them. Despite being only a grandmother or great grandfather stretch away. One great uncle died on my birthday 34 years before I was born. Another died young but my father remembers his uncle 'Owen' and tells me my brother is named after him. There's a sense of the things he knows and wants me to know but also too, a sense of these people and lives lived. That ́ we are visiting them and here they are. I have no memories of them except these very clear memories of walking this path, of long grass overgrown on graves and sunlight between tombstones. This time with my father, the feeling of importance of what it is he is trying to show me. I watch his feet move ahead of me, how our steps tread the earth further, making our brief mark. All I can do is try to remember
4.
In my teens memories split into online and real life. The online memories are images, the real life ones are feelings. Or rather, a conglomerate of feelings I’d summarise as bad. Online, the pictures of me at this time were picked to reflect how I wanted to feel, the ones deemed acceptable enough to be hung in the worldwide web of exposition, memories in Valencia or X Pro. The weight of this endeavour, this extra magnifying glass through which to pick at myself, exasperated my pubescent melodrama. Though I shouldn’t call it that, the lens of adulthood allows me to mock it as if it was some light, naive show when it wasn’t. Like Narcissus I became entirely taken in by my reflection, excusing myself at regular intervals from social occasions to go look in the bathroom mirror or opening my phone camera to check myself. I see her now, a young adult face echoing that of the young girl trying to see herself in the mirror, to get close enough and find something there. I can’t write about her as if I am her, not anymore.
They aren’t doing anything which is their favourite thing to do. She looks around the table at the friends she’s made over the past year at college and feels warm at having found them. They drink tea, taking it in turns to get up from the table and boil the kettle, preparing for the next round. She didn’t even drink tea until she met them and now they go through three or four cups each in a sitting. Then out of nowhere a familiar feeling returns, a tightness in her chest. She doesn’t bother to excuse herself anymore, hoping not to draw attention to the amount of times she leaves to go to the bathroom.
With the click of the lightswitch bleaching, white lights flicker on. The sound of a dull churning extractor fan chews up the silence. The boys don’t clean up after themselves, the sink is encrusted with toothpaste, there’s even a can of cider in the shower, but all of this is lost on the girl who is caught up in her own mind and here to find a way out. Breath blooms on the mirror as she leans in to examine her own face, each freckle, blackhead and spot still in place. She wipes under her eyes, turns her face from side to side and is disgusted by the way the light works the shadows of her acne scars. Along her neckline the skin is painful but she’s satisfied momentarily to know if and how the new spots are progressing. Satisfied and miserable, she swallows down the compulsion that brought her here to have a look. The inner critic is done gawking at herself. She clicks off the light, silencing the fan and returns to the kitchen where the validation of others might temporarily soothe her.
If I think of it too long I can stir the ghosts of that girl inside me, an echo of the tightness flutters in my chest, the desolation of self abandonment. Only the traces of her linger in my own reflection or looking at a picture of myself which I once disliked to find actually, there I am. The person in the mirror but also, a past version of her. Given enough distance I can be nice to her.
5.- Life can be so much simpler than the thoughts I’m having about it.
All these memories are meaningless aside from the meaning I sew into them. I remember other things- my dad coming into my room on a Saturday morning to tell me that my granny had died after weeks of illness that resulted in my mother’s absence throughout that summer. I remember laughing in shock at the news and lying when he enquired if I’d heard him right such was his surprise at my reaction.I remember it because I do that still, laugh at something that shocks me while the news is settling over me. But maybe I didn’t laugh that time? I’m sure if I asked him his account would differ. Later, we visited the funeral home where my grandmother was laid out. It was the first time I’d seen a dead body - certainly that of someone I knew. The shock of it made me cry but outside being comforted by my mother one of my cousins walked into a fence and fell over. When we tell that story now we do it to laugh at that moment. Another time, the break-up of a relationship that defined most of my twenties took place over the phone while I was between the fruit and veg aisles in Tescos. The moment, something I’d dreaded and avoided for perhaps longer than I should have, came unexpectedly. How can something feel shocking and inevitable in the same breath? The person I had known and shared my life with for 6 years was someone I would never see again and he could not say that to my face. In an instant I was the child lost in the shopping centre again, trying to recall a feeling of safety which existed moments before. Memories changing tone, a new filtered sliding over them irrevocably.
I can’t know myself properly in these wide open, raw moments but I look back at them with a fondness for my ability to persist inside of them.
Spending much of my time reflecting on and anticipating how I feel in different circumstances seems like time wasted and also the ongoing pursuit of myself. Whoever I am, I am always chasing her, wanting to know her. An animal in pursuit. Whether or not she will survive in a challenging situation, overcome another of life’s stopper moments, be capable of the things others expect her to be capable of, is unknown to me. For years I’ve sought to know this future, finalised forming of myself, to come to some conclusion in my brain about who she is and what she can do. As time goes on and I edge closer into the future, reaching ages and stages of life where I had assumed this final product of myself dwelled, she seems both closer and further away. I am her and yet, I know nothing of the answers I thought I would have for myself.
Instead I see now that I won’t ever be that person in my own head, there is no thought process through which I can create or define her. I put so much on future me- I would be happy when, I would love myself when, I would reach my potential when. It is too much for the future version of me to carry and someday there will be less time for the future. It will cease to hold all my delayed hopes.
Somewhere along the way I had to give myself the serenity to endeavor, to try and allow the future me to come into the present. She is formed in the doing. Her actions soothe her fears. Moreover, her actions soothe mine. If anything, all I know is that she will look back with fondness at my pursuit. I look back fondly on hers. The die is not yet cast.
Órla Masterson
Órla Masterson is a History, English and Irish teacher who lives and works in Cork city. She is currently working on her first novel.
More work by Órla Masterson
1968 - 2026
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