I met him in a queue, which feels like a very Dublin way to begin anything important. It was outside Bewley’s on Grafton Street, one of those wet December afternoons when the rain doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and make everyone shine under the Christmas lights. I was holding a paper bag with a birthday present for my sister inside, and he was standing behind me with a book under his coat, trying and failing to keep it dry.
The queue was hardly moving. Everyone was pretending not to mind. A busker nearby was singing “The Auld Triangle,” and a woman in front of us was telling her child that hot chocolate tasted better when you waited for it. I remember turning around because the man behind me laughed softly at that, not in a mocking way, but like he agreed with the philosophy. He had kind eyes, tired ones, and a scarf that looked handmade.
“She’s right,” he said, nodding towards the child. “Waiting improves nearly everything, except buses.”
I told him I had once waited forty minutes for the 46A and came out of it a worse person. He said that was because I had chosen the wrong route for spiritual growth. By the time we reached the door, I knew he was called Cian, that he worked in a print shop near Temple Bar, and that he had bought the book for his father, who was in St. James’s and pretending not to be frightened.
I told him my name was Maeve, that I taught sixth class in Phibsborough, and that I was buying cake because my sister had just turned thirty and was insisting it was “a private family tragedy.” We spoke the way strangers sometimes do when the city gives them a small shelter: honestly, because there is no obligation to continue. Inside, the windows were steamed up, the smell of coffee and cinnamon wrapped around us, and for a few minutes I forgot that I had been lonely for months.
When my order was ready, I expected the conversation to end. That is what usually happens in Dublin. People give you a story, a laugh, a kindness, and then vanish into the Luas crowd or down Nassau Street. But Cian looked at me, then at the rain outside, and said, “Would it be very strange if I asked you to have coffee with me for ten minutes?”
It was strange. It was also the first thing that had felt easy in a long time. We sat by the window, sharing the small round table as if we had booked it weeks ago. He told me his mother had died the previous spring and that every visit to the hospital made him feel twelve years old. I told him I had ended an engagement in September and still sometimes turned to say things to a person who was no longer there. Neither of us tried to fix the other. We just let the words land.
Outside, Grafton Street kept moving. Umbrellas tilted. Teenagers posed beneath the lights. A man in a suit slipped on the wet pavement and stood up laughing before anyone could pity him. Cian pointed at him and said, “That’s dignity, there. Falling with confidence.” I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my coffee.
Ten minutes became forty. I missed the bus to my sister’s and had to send her a message saying the cake and I were delayed by weather, which was not entirely a lie. Cian’s phone buzzed twice. He looked at it and his face changed. His father had asked for him. He stood up quickly, apologising though he had done nothing wrong.
At the door, he took out the book from under his coat. It
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