I had the speech ready in my coat pocket, folded between a Luas receipt and an old shopping list. Not a legal speech, not exactly. Just a page of sentences I had written because I knew if I tried to speak from the heart, I would either say too much or nothing at all. After eleven years married to Maeve, I was going to tell her I thought we had become two decent people making each other lonely.
That Friday, I was meant to go straight home to our flat in Rathmines. Instead, I followed a few lads from work into Temple Bar, telling myself I needed one pint before the end of my marriage. It was raining in that thin Dublin way that makes the cobbles shine like something in a film. Music came from every doorway. Tourists were laughing under green umbrellas. I stood outside The Palace Bar with my pint untouched, feeling like the only sober man in the city.
Maeve and I had not had a dramatic falling out. That was almost worse. We had simply become careful. Careful with our voices. Careful with money. Careful not to mention the baby we lost five years earlier, or the second one that never came, or the way grief had moved into the spare room and unpacked without asking. We still bought milk. We still texted about bins. We still kissed each other on the cheek when one of us left early. But the kiss had become more like a receipt than a promise.
Around half ten, I stepped outside to ring her, to say I was coming home, to say all the rehearsed things. That was when I saw her. Maeve was across the lane near the Ha’penny Bridge side, standing under the awning of a closed shop, her hair damp and stuck to her cheek. She was looking into the window of a small music shop that had a second-hand fiddle displayed under a weak yellow light.
For a moment I thought I had imagined her. Then she wiped her face with the sleeve of her coat, the way she did when she did not want anyone to know she was crying. I crossed the street, and she startled when she saw me, as if we had both been caught doing something shameful.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
I nearly said, leaving you. Instead I said, “I could ask you the same.”
She gave a little laugh that broke before it became anything. Then she pointed at the fiddle. “My dad had one just like that.”
I knew that, of course. Her father used to play in pubs around Dublin before his hands got too stiff. He had died the year after our miscarriage, and I had been so busy being quietly destroyed myself that I had not noticed properly how much she had lost in such a short time. I had thought our sorrow was the same sorrow, but standing there in the noise of Dublin city, I understood we had been carrying two different weights in the same house.
We walked without deciding to. Past buskers, past queues outside pubs, past a hen party singing badly and joyfully. Near the Liffey, Maeve said, “I come here sometimes after work. I don’t go in anywhere. I just walk. It’s easier to miss people when there’s noise.”
That sentence did something to me. I had spent years believing she wanted distance from me. I had never asked if distance was just the only shape her pain knew how to take.
We ended up in a quiet corner of a pub off Dame Street, not one of the loud ones, just a place with dark wood and an old man reading the
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
