I used to keep a diary in the bottom drawer of our bedside locker in Stoneybatter, under old ESB bills and a scarf she had once lent me and never asked back for. It wasn’t a romantic habit. I didn’t write poetry or press flowers between pages. I wrote the things I was too cowardly to say out loud. Small resentments. Private fears. The ugly, passing thoughts that come into a person and leave again if you give them somewhere safe to go.
We had been together four years, living in a one-bedroom flat above a shop, where the windows shook when the buses went by. Her name was Clara. She worked in a café near Smithfield, and I worked odd hours in a hotel by the quays. We were tired a lot, but we were good together in the ordinary ways that matter. She knew how I took my tea. I knew she hated the word “grand” when it was used to end an argument. On Sundays we walked through Phoenix Park and pretended we could afford a dog.
The trouble started quietly. I had been thinking about leaving Dublin for a while, not because of her, but because I felt like the city had started to know too much about me. Every street had an old version of myself standing on it. I wrote about that. I wrote that sometimes I imagined disappearing to Galway or Berlin, somewhere nobody expected me to be reliable. I wrote that Clara deserved a man with a clearer heart. I wrote, one miserable Thursday after a fight about money, that I didn’t know if love was enough.
I didn’t mean it as a verdict. I meant it as weather.
One evening in November, I came home from work and found the flat too tidy. That was the first sign. Clara cleaned when she was angry, but this was different. The cushions were straight. The dishes were washed. The little plant on the windowsill had been watered, even though it was already dead. My diary was on the kitchen table, closed, with a mug beside it that had gone cold.
She was sitting by the window in her coat.
I knew before she spoke. There are moments in life when the future enters the room before anyone opens their mouth.
“I was looking for the lease,” she said. Her voice was calm in a way that frightened me. “The letting agent emailed. I thought it might be in your drawer.”
I said her name, but it came out like a plea.
“I read enough,” she said.
I tried to explain. I told her the diary was not a map of my soul, only a bin for the worst scraps of it. I told her I loved her. I told her people write things at midnight they would never believe in the morning. She listened, which somehow made it worse. She didn’t shout. She didn’t cry. She just looked at me as if I had become a stranger who had been wearing my face for years.
“You should have told me you felt trapped,” she said.
“I didn’t feel trapped by you.”
“But I was in the room you wanted to escape from.”
There was nothing I could say to that. Not because it was fully true, but because truth often arrives mixed with misunderstanding, and you can’t separate them fast enough to save yourself.
She had packed one bag. I noticed then. It was by the door, the green one we had taken to Dingle the summer before. I remember thinking how cruel it was that a bag could hold a holiday and an ending at the same time.
I asked her not to go. I asked for one night, one proper conversation, one chance to prove that a diary page was not the whole of me. She stood up and put her hand on my cheek. That nearly broke me, because it was tender. If she had slammed the door, I might have survived it better.
“I’ll always wonder what you’re not saying,” she said. “And you’ll always wonder what I’ve read. We won’t get back from that.”
She left for her sister’s place in Rathmines. I followed her as far as the street, barefoot on the cold step, calling after her like a fool. She didn’t turn around. A taxi pulled in under
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
