Better World With Design

You know, there's something profoundly intimate about returning to moments preserved in journal entries from over thirty years ago and giving them breath as stories. Many of the lines in "Forty Pounds" come directly from those notes—fragments of conversation, observations about brass shining in hotel lobbies, the specific weight of confusion when neither person can remember who loaned money to whom. The people have been transformed, the places reimagined, but my love and respect for everyone who appears in these stories has remained constant through the decades.

What I find most compelling about these short stories is that each moment mattered intensely at the time. They were pivot points—moments that could have gone either way, or nowhere at all. Moments of change that I desired or didn't understand while living through them. Often they seemed like simple lessons then: how to say goodbye properly, how to navigate obligation, how to perform the roles assigned to you. But when you take the time to return to them years later, you discover something deeper—that people outside your immediate family found value in you, and more importantly, that these were the moments when I first discovered my own values.

The sense of smell appears throughout *The Belfasters*, and it's deeply personal to me. How smell belongs to you in a way other senses don't—it's involuntary, it's memory, it's recognition. In "Forty Pounds," I wanted Elder McClellan's cologne to be more than atmospheric detail. I wanted it to represent what remains after departure, what lingers when the person is gone. For many people who lose someone to death, scent is all that's left—a jacket that still carries their presence, a bottle of perfume, a pillow that hasn't been washed. This goodbye between Ciarán and McClellan was a kind of death, one they both understood. The relationship was always designed to end. The cologne becomes what persists after the structure collapses.

There's something almost magical about these single moments when everything aligns briefly—when honest conversation becomes possible, when vulnerability surfaces, when two people acknowledge truths they've been avoiding. You carry those moments for decades, always wondering: what if that alignment had lasted? What if circumstances had been different? What if the structures that separated us hadn't been so rigid?

But perhaps the wondering is the point. Perhaps these stories matter precisely because they capture moments of temporary alignment in a life defined by fragmentation and impermanence. The disco where I danced and felt briefly free. The work floor where competence was performance. The missionary breakfast where I served while questioning service. The Europa lobby where I released a debt that couldn't be settled. And next, the multiple towns where I scattered myself across Northern Ireland's geography, never whole in any single place.

I'm grateful to be bringing these stories into the world now, three decades after the moments that inspired them. Each one is an act of remembrance and transformation—taking what was private and making it resonant, taking what was specific to Belfast in the 1990s and finding the universal threads of doubt, longing, connection, and loss.

Thank you for listening to "Forty Pounds - The Price of Goodbye." Next time, we'll explore "Multiple Towns, One Life"—the fragmentation continues, the journey deepens.

I'm Gary Crossey, and this is *Better World with Design*.