I met Ciarán two weeks before my wedding, which is a terrible sentence to write and a worse thing to have lived. It was raining so heavily that afternoon on Grafton Street that people were stepping into shops they had no intention of buying from. I ducked into a bookshop with my hair stuck to my face, my shoes soaked through, and my wedding seating plan folded in my handbag like a legal document. He was standing in the poetry section, laughing softly at something by Patrick Kavanagh.
He asked if I was hiding from the weather or the world. I said both. That was the beginning of it, though nothing dramatic happened then. We had coffee near St Stephen’s Green, talked about our families, our jobs, the price of rent, the strange sadness of being happy. I told him I was getting married. He looked at me for a long second and said, “Then I’ll only be a stranger today.”
But he wasn’t. A week later, I found a note tucked inside the book I had bought. He had written his number on a receipt and one line: “If you ever need a stranger again.” I should have thrown it away. Instead, I put it behind my driving licence, where it stayed through the wedding, the honeymoon, the first flat in Rathmines, and the first winter when my husband and I began speaking to each other like tired colleagues.
My marriage to Alan lasted nine years. He was not a cruel man. That has always made the guilt harder to explain. He remembered my mother’s birthday, fixed the boiler without making a speech of it, and brought me tea when I was sick. But somewhere between mortgage forms and Sunday dinners, we stopped being curious about each other. We became efficient. We became polite. We became two people keeping a small machine running.
I rang Ciarán for the first time after an argument about nothing, which is how most real arguments begin. We met in Kehoe’s off South Anne Street. I told myself it was just a drink. He told me about his failed band, his father’s illness, the flat in Phibsborough where the ceiling leaked over his bed. I told him things I had not told my husband, not because they were scandalous, but because they were tender. I told him I was lonely in rooms where someone loved me.
The affair was not constant. That is how I justified it. There were months when we did not speak. Then a message would arrive: “Are you still in the world?” We met in places where Dublin seemed to keep secrets for everyone: the back of Bewley’s, a bench by the canal in Portobello, the far end of Poolbeg Lighthouse when the wind made conversation difficult. Sometimes we kissed. Sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we only walked until the shame softened into something that felt like peace.
When my marriage ended, it did not end because of Ciarán, though he had been a shadow across it. Alan found messages on my phone, old ones, careful ones, worse for being careful. He sat at the kitchen table in our house in Terenure with the phone between us and asked, “Was I ever really your husband?” I have never forgotten his face. Not angry. Not even surprised. Just emptied.
I told him the truth, but not all of it. I said it had been emotional before it was physical. I said I had been unhappy. I said I was sorry. All those things were true, and none of them were enough. He moved into his sister’s spare room in Clontarf. The house became so quiet that I could hear the fridge switching on
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
