I met Ciara on a wet Thursday in Stoneybatter, the kind of evening where the rain doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and make everyone look slightly defeated. We were both standing outside L. Mulligan Grocer, pretending to check our phones while waiting for the same friend, who was late in the heroic way Dublin people are late, as if time itself should have known better.
She looked up first and said, “You’re here for Mark’s birthday, aren’t you?” I said I was. Then, because I was nervous, I added, “Unfortunately.” She laughed, and that was the beginning of our long performance of not being interested in each other.
Inside, we ended up across the table, then beside each other, then outside together again when the place got too warm. We talked about rent, buses, bad dates, good chips, and how neither of us had ever managed to leave Dublin no matter how often we threatened to. At the end of the night, Mark said, “You two seemed cosy,” and we both answered too quickly, “No, we didn’t.”
After that, we kept appearing in the same places. A coffee in Smithfield became “just because we were both nearby.” A walk through the Phoenix Park was “for fresh air, not a date.” When she came to see the flat I was moving into off Dorset Street, she brought a plant and said, “This is not a housewarming gift, it’s just something I didn’t want anymore.” It was brand new, still with the price sticker on the pot.
I don’t know why we fought it. Maybe because both of us had been hurt in ordinary, unremarkable ways that still left marks. She had come out of a six-year relationship with a man who proposed only after she’d already stopped hoping. I had spent the previous year loving someone who loved the idea of me more than the reality. So Ciara and I built a little border between us and called it friendship. We leaned over it constantly, but never crossed.
The pretending became almost comic. If our hands touched while walking down Capel Street, one of us would make a joke about poor street lighting. If I remembered how she took her tea, she’d say I had a disturbing memory. If she texted me after midnight because she couldn’t sleep, she’d begin with, “Don’t get notions.” I always replied, “Wouldn’t dream of it,” while grinning at the ceiling like an eejit.
The night everything changed was in November, after a small gig in Whelan’s. We had gone with a group, but by the time we came out onto Wexford Street, the others had scattered into taxis and chipper queues. It was cold enough to make conversation visible. Ciara tucked her hands into her sleeves and asked if I wanted to walk a bit. I said yes, though my bus was right there, doors open, practically begging me to be sensible.
We walked towards the canal, speaking less than usual. There was a quietness between us I didn’t know what to do with. At Portobello Bridge, she stopped and looked down at the black water, where the lights stretched and broke whenever the wind moved. I remember thinking she looked tired, not dramatically sad, just tired of holding herself together in the particular way adults do.
She said, “I’m going to say something, and you’re not allowed to make a joke.”
I said, “That’s a lot to ask.”
She didn’t laugh. So I shut up.
“I think I’m in love with you,” she said. “And I’m annoyed about it.”
It should have been a grand moment, but I panicked. Not because I didn’t feel the same, but because I did, and suddenly the safe little world we’d made had a door in it. I looked at her, then at the canal, then at a cyclist going past with no lights, as if he might have an answer.
Ciara nodded once, like she had expected silence and was angry with herself for hoping otherwise. “Forget it,” she said, and turned to walk away.
That was when I understood something simple and frightening: if I let her go in that moment, I would spend years pretending that was fine too.
I caught up with her outside a closed café and said her name.
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
