I met Niamh at Electric Picnic in 2018, in the kind of rain that makes everyone look equal. Hair stuck to faces, glitter sliding down cheeks, shoes ruined beyond repair. I was standing outside a food truck in Stradbally, pretending I was grand, when really I had never felt more lost in my life.
My father had died that spring, and I had responded by becoming very busy. Busy at work, busy at the pub, busy saying yes to things I didn’t want to do. Electric Picnic was one of them. My mates had dragged me down from Dublin, convinced that three days of music and cans would “sort me out”. By Saturday evening, I was soaked, exhausted, and quietly planning to get the next bus home.
Then Niamh asked if I was in the queue or just dramatically blocking it.
She was wearing a yellow raincoat and silver boots covered in muck. There was a small paper flower painted on her cheek, half washed away. I said I was doing both. She laughed like she hadn’t expected me to answer properly, and somehow we ended up sharing chips under a strip of plastic shelter while The 1975 played somewhere in the distance.
We talked the way people talk at festivals, quickly and honestly, because there is no ordinary life around you to interrupt. She was from Drumcondra, worked in a bookshop, and had come with two friends who had abandoned her for a silent disco. I told her I worked in insurance near Grand Canal Dock and made it sound more interesting than it was. I didn’t tell her about my father at first. I didn’t tell anyone about him if I could help it.
Later, we walked through the campsite, past tents sagging in the rain and lads singing rebel songs badly. Niamh had a way of noticing small things: a child asleep on his mother’s shoulder, a man carefully cleaning his girlfriend’s muddy glasses, the volunteers dancing while picking up rubbish. “People are softer than they let on,” she said. I remember that sentence because it annoyed me. I thought softness was dangerous then.
Near midnight, we found ourselves at the edge of a crowd, listening to a singer I can’t even remember now. Niamh asked me why I looked sad when I thought nobody was watching. It was such a direct question that I couldn’t dodge it. So I told her. Not everything, just enough. That my dad used to ring me every Sunday. That I still checked my phone at the same time. That I had kept his last voicemail but couldn’t bring myself to play it.
She didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t say he was in a better place or that time heals all wounds. She just stood beside me in the rain and said, “That sounds unbearable.” And for some reason, those three words undid me. I cried at Electric Picnic, surrounded by strangers and bass and mud, while a girl I had met two hours earlier held my hand as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
We lost each other the next morning. My phone died, hers had no signal, and I only knew her first name and that she sold books somewhere in Dublin. I thought that would be the whole story: one strange, kind night that I would carry around privately. But on Monday evening, back in Dublin, I walked into a bookshop on a ridiculous hunch. It wasn’t hers. Neither was the next one. By Wednesday, I felt like an eejit.
On Thursday, I found her in a small shop not far from Camden Street, stacking novels by the front window. She looked up, recognised me, and said, “You’re very committed for a
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
