I met Niamh on a wet Thursday outside Connolly Station, both of us pretending the rain was manageable. I had one broken umbrella and she had none at all. She was laughing into her phone, telling someone she was grand, though her coat was soaked through and her hair had stuck itself to her face. When her phone died mid-sentence, she looked at it like it had personally betrayed her. I don’t know what made me offer her half my umbrella. I was shy then, the sort of man who apologised when someone else stepped on my foot. But I lifted the umbrella between us and said, “I’m going as far as O’Connell Street if that helps.” She looked at me for a second, weighing up whether I was harmless, then stepped under it and said, “You’ll do.”
We walked too close because the umbrella was too small, shoulders bumping every few steps. She told me she was late for a leaving party in Temple Bar. I told her I worked in a printing shop near Amiens Street and was going home to a flat I shared with two men who labelled their milk but stole my tea bags. She laughed at that, and I remember feeling absurdly proud, as if I had written a poem instead of complained about breakfast supplies. At the corner, she was meant to turn left and I was meant to keep going, but the rain was coming down hard and neither of us moved. “You could come for one drink,” she said. “If you’re not secretly on your way to something important.” I had nothing important waiting for me, only a microwave dinner and the same silence I had been carrying for months. So I went.
One drink became three, and her leaving party became something we both stood slightly outside of. She introduced me as “the umbrella man,” and when people asked how we knew each other, she made it sound like a grand rescue. I liked how she could turn a small thing into a story without making it false. Near midnight, we left the pub and walked across the city centre under the same ruined umbrella. By then the rain had stopped. She asked for my number outside Trinity College Dublin, and because I was nervous, I gave it to her too quickly, as if she might change her mind if I took too long.
We were together for nearly four years. Not loudly, not dramatically, but in the ordinary way that love becomes part of the furniture of your life. She learned how I took my tea. I learned that she hummed when she was trying not to cry. We rented a tiny place in Drumcondra with a bathroom window that never closed properly. On Sundays we walked through St Stephen’s Green and bought coffee we couldn’t really afford. She wanted a dog, I wanted savings, and we argued about both with the seriousness of people who believed the future was guaranteed.
Then her mother got sick, and love stopped being easy. Niamh began travelling back west every second weekend, then every weekend, then whenever the phone rang. She was tired in a way sleep couldn’t fix. I tried to help, but I was clumsy with grief. I offered solutions when she needed softness. I complained about missing her when she was already torn in half. One evening, after a long train journey back into Heuston, she sat at our kitchen table and said, “I don’t have enough of myself left to be your girlfriend properly.” I said the wrong thing. I said, “So what am I supposed to do?” She looked at me with such disappointment that I still feel it sometimes. “Stay,” she said. “Not
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