I came to Dublin with a ring on my finger and left with it wrapped in a receipt from a chemist on Westmoreland Street. It sounds dramatic now, like the sort of thing you would hear from a woman trying to make herself interesting at a dinner party, but at the time it was embarrassingly quiet. No shouting in the rain. No glass thrown against a wall. Just the slow, awful understanding that the life I had agreed to was not the life I wanted.
Mark and I had been engaged for six months when we booked the holiday. He was from London, I was from Cork, and Dublin had become our compromise city, the place where neither of us belonged enough to claim it. We chose a long weekend in March because he wanted “proper Ireland” without having to drive too far, and I wanted to show him that home was not just postcards and pints. We stayed in a small hotel near St Stephen’s Green, where the carpet smelled faintly of lavender and damp coats.
The first day was lovely in the way photographs can be lovely. We walked down Grafton Street, watched a busker sing The Cranberries, and drank coffee in a place where Mark complained that the chairs were too small. He had always complained, but back then I thought of it as charm. He was decisive, I told myself. He knew what he liked. When he corrected my pronunciation of an Irish word in front of the waiter, I laughed because the waiter laughed, though something small folded in me.
That evening we met my cousin Aoife and her husband in Kehoe’s. It was packed, warm, and full of elbows. Mark stood very straight in the middle of it all, like the pub had personally offended him. Aoife was telling a story about our granda taking the wrong bus after a funeral and ending up in Bray, and I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. Mark leaned towards me and said, not quietly enough, “Your family are a bit much, aren’t they?”
I pretended not to hear him. That was one of my talents in those days. I could turn a sharp sentence into background noise. I could make a home out of being slightly hurt.
The next morning, we took the DART to Howth. The sea was grey and restless, and the gulls sounded like they were laughing at everyone. I had been looking forward to it most of all. My father used to bring me there when I was small, and we would eat chips out of paper and pretend we could see America if we squinted hard enough. I told Mark this as we walked along the pier.
He was on his phone. Not secretly, not guiltily. Just openly absent.
“Are you listening?” I asked.
“Work thing,” he said.
We had agreed before the trip that work would stay away. He was always busy, always needed, always answering someone more important than the person in front of him. I looked at his screen before I could stop myself. It was not work. It was a message from his mother.
Did you tell her about September yet?
I asked him what September meant. He locked the phone too quickly.
There are moments when love does not die, exactly. It looks up. It pays attention.
He tried to laugh it off. Then he got irritated. Then, because the truth had nowhere else to go, he told me. He had accepted a job in Singapore. He had known for three weeks. His mother knew. His brother knew. A few friends knew. I did not. The plan, he said, was for us to move after the wedding. He had assumed I would come. He had assumed I would be excited. He had assumed my job, my mother’s illness, my small
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
