I met him on a wet Thursday night outside Whelan’s, when the whole of Camden Street was shining under the rain like somebody had polished it for heartbreak. I was twenty-four, working in a café near Grafton Street, sharing a cold flat in Rathmines with two girls I barely knew, and pretending I was happier than I was. He asked me for a lighter. I told him I didn’t smoke. He said, “Neither do I, not really,” and somehow that was enough to start a conversation.
His name was Ciarán. He had kind eyes, the kind that made you feel listened to before you’d said anything important. We ended up in a quiet corner of a pub off Dublin city centre, talking about music, our fathers, the places we wanted to run away to. I told him I wanted to live in Paris. He told me he wanted to open a bookshop by the sea. By closing time, we were holding hands like we’d known each other for years.
I had never done anything like that before. I was sensible, careful, always the friend who got everyone else into taxis. But that night I went back to his tiny bedsit near Portobello. There was a cracked mug on the windowsill with a dying basil plant in it, and Van Morrison playing low from an old speaker. We kissed like we were trying to prove something to ourselves. In the morning, I woke before him and watched the rain run down the glass. I remember thinking, This is where my real life begins.
He made me tea. We laughed about being strangers. He wrote his number on the back of a receipt from a Spar on Harcourt Street and told me to call him. I put it into the pocket of my denim jacket and walked home along the canal feeling lighter than I had in years.
That afternoon, my mother rang to say my father had collapsed. Everything after that became hospital corridors, cups of machine coffee, whispered updates in the Mater, relatives appearing with sandwiches no one ate. My father survived, but he came home changed, frightened, suddenly old. I moved back to help my mother in Clontarf “just for a while,” which became months. In the middle of it all, I washed that denim jacket without checking the pockets. The receipt dissolved into white fluff.
I told myself it didn’t matter. It had been one night. A beautiful one, but still one night. I could have gone back to Whelan’s, asked around, searched harder. But I was proud and scared. Part of me thought if he had wanted me badly enough, he would find me too. That is the arrogance of the young, believing the universe is a postman with your address in its hand.
Years passed. I married a good man named Stephen. We bought a house in Swords, had a daughter, separated kindly after eleven years when kindness was all that was left. I built a decent life. I worked, cooked dinners, paid bills, attended school plays, buried my father, cared for my mother. But every so often, usually on wet nights, I would think of Ciarán’s bedsit and the basil plant and the way he said my name as if he was trying it out for a future.
The regret was not that I lost a great romance. I didn’t know him long enough to claim that. The regret was smaller and sharper. I regretted not being brave enough to knock on the door of the possibility. I regretted letting one ruined receipt decide the shape of my imagination for twenty years.
Last autumn, my daughter brought me to a second-hand bookshop in Howth after lunch by the harbour. She was looking for a poetry collection for college. I was browsing a shelf of Irish memoirs when I heard a man laugh behind me. I knew it before I turned. Not the sound exactly, but the feeling it made in me.
Ciarán was older, of course. Grey in his beard, lines around his eyes, a pair of reading glasses hanging from his jumper. But it was him. He owned the shop. By the sea, just as he’d said he wanted. For a moment neither of us spoke. Then he smiled and said my name.
We went for coffee while my daughter pretended not to be fascinated. Ciarán told me he had looked for me for a few weeks back then. He went to the pub where we’d met, even asked at Whelan’s once, feeling like a fool. Then life took him elsewhere. He had married, been widowed,
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
