The invitation arrived on a wet Tuesday in Portobello, the kind of rain that makes the canal look tired. I had just come home from work, shoes soaked, bag full of groceries I didn’t remember buying, when I saw the cream envelope on the floor inside the door. My name was written in her handwriting. I knew it before I picked it up. Four years had passed, but some things don’t leave you. The slope of her M. The little curl at the end of my surname.
Her name was Aoife. We met in Dublin when we were both twenty-six and convinced that life would get clearer if we just kept walking around it. Our first date was in Grogan’s, then chips on the steps near Dame Street, laughing at nothing. We moved in together too soon, into a flat near Rathmines with windows that rattled in the wind. For three years, I thought love was a room we had built together. Then, slowly, it became a room we were both trying to leave without hurting each other.
There was no great betrayal. That almost made it worse. We simply ran out of ways to be kind. She wanted steadiness, a house, maybe a child. I wanted time, freedom, some vague version of myself I could never properly describe. I said I wasn’t ready so often that it became my personality. When she left, she cried while folding tea towels. I remember standing in the doorway, useless, with a mug in my hand. I didn’t ask her to stay. For years afterwards, that was the part I couldn’t forgive myself for.
The invitation was for a wedding in Cork, in a small hotel near the River Lee. Her fiancé’s name was Cian. I had heard of him through mutual friends, always in that careful tone people use when they are checking your face for cracks. He was from Ballincollig, worked in architecture, made her laugh. That last detail stayed with me longer than it should have.
I told myself I wouldn’t go. Then I told myself I’d go because I was mature. Then I admitted, on a bench in Phoenix Park, that I wanted to see if she looked at him the way she used to look at me. It was not noble. It was human, and a bit ugly.
On the morning of the wedding, I took the train from Heuston with a navy suit in a garment bag and a stomach full of bad coffee. I watched Dublin slide away through the window, the backs of houses, the wet fields, the grey sky opening and closing. I kept thinking I might turn around in Mallow, invent an illness, disappear from the guest list like a sensible man. But I stayed on.
The hotel in Cork smelled of lilies and polished wood. I recognised a few faces from our old life: her college friend Sinéad, her brother Mark, a couple we used to meet for brunch when brunch still felt like proof we were doing adulthood correctly. Everyone was kind. Too kind, almost. I could feel myself becoming a small event inside the larger event.
Then Aoife appeared at the top of the aisle, and something in me went quiet. She looked beautiful, yes, but not in the way I had feared. She didn’t look like a memory. She looked like herself now. Older, calmer, more certain. When she smiled at Cian, it wasn’t the smile I had been carrying around for years. It belonged to a life I was not in. I felt grief then, but it was clean grief, like rain after a fever.</
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
