I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday in Dublin, the kind of rain that doesn’t fall so much as hover around you until you give up and accept it. We were both working in a small café near St Stephen’s Green, serving tourists who asked if the weather was always like this and office workers who knew better than to ask. She was new, from Galway, with a laugh that arrived before she did. I was twenty-six, living in a room in Phibsborough with a radiator that sounded haunted, and I thought I was only trying to get through the winter.
Aoife made ordinary days feel less ordinary. She remembered everyone’s coffee order, not because she had to, but because she liked people feeling seen. On quiet afternoons, when the café emptied and the windows fogged up, she would tell me about the sea near Salthill, her mother’s Sunday dinners, and the way she used to think Dublin would swallow her whole. I told her about growing up in Tallaght, about my father leaving, about how I used jokes like a coat I never took off. She never laughed when I was being serious by accident. She just listened, and that was new to me.
We started spending time together after shifts. Sometimes we walked through Dublin with no plan, past the buskers on Grafton Street, along the Grand Canal when the light was soft, or into Grogan’s for one drink that became three. She loved Whelan’s, even when the band was terrible. She said bad music was still better than silence. I pretended to agree, but really I just liked standing beside her in the noise, our shoulders touching, both of us looking at the stage and not at each other.
Everyone assumed we were together before we ever were. Customers teased us. Our manager called us “the old married couple” when we argued about playlists or whose turn it was to mop. I denied it too quickly. Aoife never denied it. She would only smile and say, “He’d be lucky,” and then go back to steaming milk as if she hadn’t just knocked the air out of me.
The truth was that she had someone back in Galway. His name was Cian. They had been together since college, though “together” seemed a generous word for what they were. He visited once every few months. She became quieter before he came and quieter after he left. I never asked too much because I was afraid of the answers. It was easier to live in the space between things, where nothing had to be named and therefore nothing could be lost.
One evening in late May, after a closing shift, we walked to the canal with chips from a takeaway on Camden Street. The city was warm in that rare Dublin way, as if everyone had been forgiven for something. We sat with our feet almost over the water, and she told me Cian had asked her to move back west. He had a job lined up. A flat. A plan. She said the word plan like it was both a gift and a sentence.
I remember the paper bag of chips between us going greasy and cold. I remember a cyclist ringing his bell at two lads blocking the path. I remember thinking that this was the moment in films where someone says, “Don’t go.” But real life is not kind enough to give you music in the background or courage on demand.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
She looked at me for a long time. “I’ve loved him for years.”
It should have ended there, but love is selfish even when you try to make it noble. I said, “That’s not what I asked.”
She turned away then. Her eyes filled, and I hated myself for causing it. “I don’t know,” she said. “But he’s asking me. You never did.”
I could have told her everything. That I loved her in the small ways first, and then in all the ways. That I looked for her face in every room. That when something funny happened, I stored it to tell her later. That I had been waiting for the right moment, not understanding that moments don’t arrive polished and ready. You make them, or you lose them
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
