I met Clara in the upstairs room of a pub off South William Street, at one of those open mic nights where everyone is either heartbroken, about to be heartbroken, or pretending very hard not to care. I was twenty-six, working mornings in a café near Grand Canal Dock, and carrying a notebook everywhere like it was proof I had a future. Clara was in the front row, chin in her hand, listening as if every unfinished line I read had already become something important.
Afterwards, she told me I had “a dangerous kind of hope.” I laughed because I had twelve euro in my account and a damp room in Phibsborough, but she said it like she could see a whole life ahead of me. That was the first thing I loved about her. Not her hair, not her wit, not even the way she walked through Dublin rain without rushing. It was the fact that she believed in the version of me I was too tired to believe in myself.
For a year, she was everywhere in my dreams. She came to my readings in basements and back rooms. She sat with me in St Stephen’s Green while I rewrote the same page six times. She made tea at midnight when I said I was giving up. When I got rejected by a small magazine in Galway, she printed the email and wrote, “First of many no’s before the yes,” across the top. I kept it pinned above my desk.
The trouble was, Clara didn’t just encourage my writing. She organised my whole soul around it. If I said I wanted a quiet weekend, she called it fear. If I took an extra shift at the café because rent was due, she looked disappointed, as though I had betrayed some sacred calling. She introduced me to people as “a writer” before I had the courage to say it myself, and at first that felt like love. Later, it felt like a costume she needed me to keep wearing.
One evening in November, I told her I was thinking of applying for a steady job in an office near the quays. Nothing glamorous, just admin with normal hours and a salary that would let me sleep. We were walking along the River Liffey, the city lights breaking in the water, and I remember feeling almost hopeful, like maybe I could still write without starving for it.
Clara stopped near Ha’penny Bridge and stared at me as if I had confessed to a crime. “But that’s not you,” she said.
I told her maybe it was a part of me she didn’t know yet. She shook her head. “You’re scared. You’re choosing smallness.”
That word stayed with me. Smallness. I looked at the buses passing, the students laughing, the office workers heading home with takeaway bags, all of us trying to survive the city in our own ordinary ways. I wondered when wanting a stable life had become a failure of imagination.
A few weeks later, I got shortlisted for a literary prize. It wasn’t life-changing money, but it mattered. Clara cried when I told her. She rang her friends before I rang my mother. She booked a table in a little Italian place in Temple Bar and toasted “the beginning.” I should have been happy, but there was a hard little stone in my chest. I realised she was more delighted by what the news meant for the story she had written about me than by what it meant for the man sitting across from her.
The prize night was held in a hotel near Merrion Square. I didn’t win. I came second, which still felt miraculous to me, but Clara went quiet. At the bar afterwards, people congratulated me and I felt proud in a shaky, private way. Then I saw her near the cloakroom, telling someone, “He should have won. He’s just not ruthless enough yet.”
Not talented enough, I could have survived. Not lucky enough, I’d heard before. But not ruthless enough felt like she was measuring my heart and finding it inconvenient.
We argued outside under a thin, needling rain. I told her I was tired of being loved like a project. She said I was ungrateful, that she had given me confidence, contacts, discipline. She wasn’t wrong. That made it harder. Love doesn’t always fail because someone was cruel. Sometimes it fails because someone loves the brightest, farthest version of you and cannot forgive the human being who has to wake up in your body every morning.
I walked home alone
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
