I met him on a wet Tuesday outside Trinity College Dublin, both of us standing under the same too-small bus shelter, pretending the rain wasn’t coming sideways. He offered me half his umbrella to cross the road, and I said, “I’m grand,” because that is what you say in Dublin even when you are clearly not grand at all. By the time we reached the opposite footpath, my left sleeve was soaked and he was laughing. I remember thinking his laugh sounded like someone opening a window.
We became friends by accident. He was a friend of a friend, then a regular at birthdays, then the person I somehow always ended up sitting beside in pubs on Camden Street. He drank Guinness too slowly, always left the last mouthful, and knew the words to songs he claimed to hate. I loved him quietly through seven summers and seven winters, through the Luas strikes, rent increases, bad haircuts, new jobs, and all the ordinary weather of being young in Dublin.
I never said a word because our friendship felt like a glass I could not afford to drop. He was kind to me in the way that makes hope dangerous. If I mentioned I was having a bad week, he would arrive with coffee from a place near Ranelagh and a stupid story about something that happened on the bus. If I was quiet at a gathering, he noticed. Once, after a breakup I pretended not to care about, he walked with me around St Stephen’s Green for nearly two hours, saying very little, just staying beside me until I could breathe properly again. That night I nearly told him. I had the sentence ready in my mouth. Then he said, “You’re my best friend, you know that?” and the words went back down like stones.
People think silence is empty, but mine was full. Full of rehearsed confessions in bathroom mirrors. Full of jealousy I had no right to feel when he dated women who were perfectly lovely. Full of texts I typed and deleted. I watched him fall in love twice. I listened to him describe a girl’s smile once while my own smile hurt my face. I became an expert in being happy for him. It is a skill, but it is not a healthy one if you practise it too long.
The ending began in The Long Hall on a Friday evening, though I didn’t know it then. He told me he had been offered a job in Berlin. “Only for a year, maybe two,” he said, as if time was a small thing you could fold and put in your pocket. I congratulated him. I even raised my glass. But something inside me gave way. Seven years suddenly felt less romantic than cowardly. I had protected our friendship, yes, but I had also trapped myself inside it.
For the next three weeks, I was useless. I burned toast. I missed my stop. I cried once in the queue at Lidl because they were out of the yogurt I liked, which had absolutely nothing to do with yogurt. The night before he left, our group had a farewell dinner near George’s Street Arcade. Everyone hugged him and made jokes about German punctuality. I sat there with my heart making a show of itself.
Afterwards, he and I walked toward the river. Dublin was doing that thing it does after rain, shining under streetlights like it had been polished for the tourists. On the Ha’penny Bridge, he stopped to take a photo of the Liffey. I remember the exact feeling of my hand gripping the cold rail. I thought, if I let him leave
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
