For almost a year after my husband died, I walked through Dublin as if I were looking at it through rain on glass. I went to work, bought milk, answered people politely, and came home to a flat in Rathmines that still held the shape of him. His mug beside the kettle. His old jacket on the back of the bedroom door. The little pile of coins he used to leave on the windowsill because he hated heavy pockets. Everyone said time would soften it, but time only made the silence more organised.
I met Daniel on a Thursday evening in February, outside St Stephen’s Green. I remember it because I had gone there to sit on a bench and cry without frightening my neighbours. It was freezing, the kind of cold that makes your hands clumsy, and I was trying to open a packet of tissues when they flew everywhere. A man beside me bent down and started collecting them from the wet path as if they were important documents. He handed them back and said, “I’d say they were trying to escape.”
I laughed. Not much, just a small surprised sound, but it felt almost violent in my chest. I hadn’t laughed properly in months. Then I felt guilty for laughing, which was ridiculous, but grief makes ordinary things feel like betrayal.
Daniel didn’t ask why I was crying. That was the first thing I liked about him. He only sat at the other end of the bench with a paper cup of coffee and told me he was waiting for his niece to finish a piano lesson on Grafton Street. He had kind eyes, tired but not defeated, and paint on one sleeve of his coat. He was a signwriter, he said, though most people wanted vinyl now and nobody cared if letters had a bit of soul. I told him my husband used to love old pub signs. Then I stopped talking because I had said “my husband” and the word had opened something.
Daniel looked at the pigeons near the railings and said, “Mine was my sister. Three years ago. Some days I still turn to tell her something stupid.”
That was how he got past the locked door. Not by trying to cheer me up, not by saying he understood everything, but by admitting there was a room inside him that was still dark too.
We didn’t exchange numbers that day. I thought about him all week, though, and then felt foolish for it. The next Thursday, I went back to the same bench, pretending to myself that I only needed fresh air. He was there before me, holding two coffees like a man who had made a decision and was embarrassed by it. “One is yours if you want it,” he said. “If not, I’ll be impressively awake.”
After that, Thursdays became ours. We walked through Dublin in the blue hour after work, when the shop windows glowed and the buses sighed at the kerbs. We crossed the Ha’penny Bridge with our shoulders nearly touching. We shared chips from a paper bag near Dame Street. Once, he brought me to The Cobblestone in Smithfield, where the music was so alive it seemed to shake dust from the rafters. I cried during a slow air and he didn’t make a performance of comforting me. He just placed his hand over mine on the table, warm and steady, and let me stay exactly as I was.
The night everything changed was in May. It had been one year since my husband’s funeral, and I had planned to spend the evening alone with a bottle of wine and every sad song I could find. Daniel rang and asked if I would come out. I nearly said no. I was afraid that if I stepped into joy on that date, I would be leaving my husband behind.
But Daniel said, gently, “Love isn’t a house with only one room.”
So I met him by the gates of Trinity College. He had painted a small wooden sign for me, no bigger than a book. On it, in careful cream letters, he had written: You are still here. Underneath, in tiny gold, he had added: and that matters.
I stood there with the sign
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
