I met Niall in a queue outside a small gig near Wexford Street, both of us pretending not to be freezing. He had a navy scarf wrapped twice around his neck and a paper cup of coffee gone cold in his hand. I remember him because he turned to me and said, “If this band is terrible, we’ll have suffered for art,” and I laughed too hard, because I was twenty-three and lonely and wanted someone to notice I had arrived in the world.
We became friends quickly after that. Not the dramatic kind of friends who tell everyone they are soulmates, just the steady kind. We met after work for pints in Dublin, sent each other stupid photos of dogs on the Luas, and had a habit of walking nowhere in particular when we couldn’t afford another drink. He worked in a bookshop then. I was doing admin in an office off Harcourt Street and counting the days until I became some better version of myself.
Everyone assumed something was happening between us, which made us both stubborn about insisting there wasn’t. He dated a nurse from Rathmines. I went out with a man who wore expensive coats and made me feel like an unpaid intern in my own relationship. Niall and I never crossed the line. We stood right up against it for years, hands in pockets, pretending not to see it.
The kiss happened on a Thursday in November, the kind of wet, shining evening when the streets look more honest under the rain. We had been at a birthday upstairs in a pub near Temple Bar. It was too warm inside, too many damp coats steaming on chairs, too much shouting over music nobody had chosen. Niall had just told me he was moving to Galway for a job. He said it lightly, like it was a weather update, but something in my chest folded in on itself.
I said I was happy for him. I was, in the way you can be happy for someone and still feel abandoned. He smiled and looked down at his pint. “You’ll barely notice I’m gone,” he said.
I hated him a little for saying that. I hated myself more for wanting to prove him wrong.
We left the party early and walked towards the river. The rain had eased into a mist, soft enough to feel romantic if you were the sort of person who trusted romance. By the Ha’penny Bridge, we stopped because neither of us seemed to know which direction to take. He was going north to his flat. I was going south to a night bus. People moved around us with umbrellas and takeaway bags, and Dublin kept doing what Dublin does best: pretending not to notice a private disaster happening in public.
He said, “I’ll come back all the time.”
I said, “People say that.”
He looked at me then, properly. Not friendly, not joking, not safely. I had seen him look at other people that way, and I had always told myself I was glad not to be one of them. But standing there, with the Liffey black beside us and his scarf dark from rain, I wanted the truth more than I wanted the friendship to remain undamaged.
He kissed me first. Or maybe I moved first. For years I tried to assign responsibility, as if that would make it less mine. It was not a long kiss, but it was not a mistake either. It had all the years inside it: every late-night walk, every almost-confession, every time one of us had looked away too quickly. His hand touched my cheek, cold from the weather, and I felt a grief so sudden I nearly stepped back.
When it ended, we both laughed once, quietly, the way people laugh at funerals when they don’t know where to put their hands.
“We shouldn’t,” I said.
“No,” he said.
Then he asked if I was okay, because of course he did. That was the worst part. I nodded, because I had learned young that nodding was easier than explaining. He walked me as far as Dame Street. We said goodnight with a hug that was too careful,
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
