I met Aoife on a Tuesday evening in Dublin, the kind of evening where the rain hangs in the air without ever properly falling. We were both sheltering under the same narrow awning outside a café near George’s Street, pretending to be patient with the weather. She had a blue scarf wrapped twice around her neck and a paper bag of books tucked under her coat. When a taxi splashed through a puddle and soaked my shoes, she laughed before she apologised, and somehow that laugh became the beginning of three years of almost.
She was the sort of person who made a room feel chosen. When she listened, she turned her whole face towards you. When she spoke, she made small ordinary things sound worth noticing. I was twenty-six, working in an office near the quays, renting a cold room in Phibsborough, and convinced that if I was steady enough, kind enough, close enough, she would eventually see me the way I saw her.
For a while, I thought she did. We went for walks through St Stephen’s Green after work. We queued for chips in Temple Bar at midnight and ate them from the paper, leaning against a wall like teenagers. She sent me photos of clouds over the Liffey and voice notes when she couldn’t sleep. Once, after a gig in Whelan’s, she held my hand all the way to the taxi rank. I remember thinking, there it is, that tiny door opening.
But Aoife always had someone else. Not always a boyfriend, exactly. Sometimes it was an ex who had “changed.” Sometimes it was a man from work who “understood her mess.” Sometimes it was a fella she’d met at a house party in Rathmines who played guitar badly but looked at her like she was a song. She would tell me about them with her head on my shoulder, and I would nod like a good friend while something small and hopeful in me folded itself away.
The worst part was that she never lied. She never promised me anything. She never said, wait for me. She only made me feel, in a hundred quiet ways, that if the timing were better, if her heart were less tangled, if life were kinder, it might be me. I lived on that “might” for longer than I like to admit.
The incident that ended it happened on a wet Friday in November. She rang me at half ten, crying so hard I could barely understand her. I was in my room, half asleep, with laundry drying over the radiator. She said she was outside Kehoe’s, that she couldn’t go home, that she had made a mistake. I put on my coat without thinking. I didn’t even change my shoes.
When I found her, she was standing under the yellow light near the pub door, mascara smudged, hair stuck to her cheeks. She looked smaller than I’d ever seen her. I asked what happened, and she said, “I told him I loved him, and he said he wasn’t ready.”
Him was Cian. Cian had appeared six weeks earlier, a photographer with a leather jacket and a talent for disappearing. I knew his name before I knew his face. I knew his favourite drink, his bad relationship with his father, his habit of leaving messages on read. Aoife had described him to me in pieces, each one handed over like evidence, and I had taken them all in silence.
I walked her towards Grafton Street because she said she needed air. The city was shiny with rain. Buses sighed at the kerb. A man played violin under a shopfront, the notes thin and brave against the weather. Aoife kept saying she was stupid. I kept saying she wasn’t.
At the corner near the flower sellers, she stopped and looked at me. “Why do I keep choosing people who don’t choose me?” she asked.
I should have given a gentle answer. I should have said something wise about fear or old wounds or the strange maps we inherit from childhood. Instead, because I was tired and soaked and suddenly very aware of my own life passing, I said, “I don’t know. But I know I keep doing the same thing with you.”
She blinked at me. The rain moved between us like static.
I told her I loved her. Not dramatically, not like in films, but plainly, the way you admit you’ve lost something important. I told her I had loved her
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
