The Emerald Files

In 2018, my then-boyfriend and I decided to go to Ireland. We’d been dating only a few months when we started planning it, and booking an international trip seemed like a gesture of massive commitment. Three years later, we would make an actual gesture of massive commitment and get married.

The reason we chose Ireland as our destination was, to my recollection, because I had learned to play a smattering of Irish tunes on my fiddle. We shared an intense aesthetic attraction to the sound: a mix of joy and sorrow, tunes you could dance to and cry to. My mother has shared with me that she used to be similarly enamored with Irish music and chalks that up to its similarities to Eastern European Jewish music, which is our actual cultural heritage. Perhaps that’s why Irish fiddle tunes resonate so deeply in my soul. Perhaps it’s because it was the soundtrack to my falling in love. Or perhaps it’s because, as a spiritually inclined friend once informed me, I used to be an Irish nun in a past life.