I met her through a pane of glass in Smithfield, in the second spring of the pandemic, when Dublin had gone quiet in a way I had never heard before. I was delivering groceries for a volunteer group, mostly to older people and anyone told to cocoon. Her name was Niamh, and she lived on the ground floor of an apartment block near the old cobbles, with a small balcony full of herbs and one stubborn sunflower that leaned towards the courtyard like it was trying to escape.
The first time I arrived, I left the bag outside her door and stepped back. She opened it wearing a blue mask and yellow rubber gloves, though she couldn’t have been more than thirty. Her hair was tied up with a pencil. “You’re the lad who got the oat milk right,” she said through the crack in the door. “That makes you a hero in this house.”
She had a condition that made ordinary infections dangerous. She told me later that before all of this, she had worked in costume design, mostly small theatre productions around Dublin. She missed the dust of backstage rooms, the panic before a curtain, the strange intimacy of pinning a hem while an actor forgot their lines. I was working from a bedroom in Stoneybatter, answering emails for a company that sold software nobody understood. I had not touched another person in months, not even my mother, who waved at me from her porch in Raheny like I was a sailor going off to war.
After a few deliveries, Niamh began leaving notes taped to the inside of the glass. Bad day. Tell me something outside. So I did. I told her about the gulls fighting over chips near the Liffey, about the man doing tai chi alone in Phoenix Park, about the smell of rain rising off the stones near Capel Street. She laughed at my descriptions and said I made the city sound like an elderly aunt with secrets.
We started speaking on the phone while I stood outside her window. At first it was ten minutes. Then twenty. Then I would bring coffee for myself and sit on the low wall across from her balcony, and she would sit inside with a mug pressed between both hands. There was always glass
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
