I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday in Dublin, the kind of evening where the buses hissed at the kerb and everyone on Grafton Street looked personally offended by the rain. I was working in a bookshop near Dawson Street then, stacking poetry in the corner nobody visited, and she came in looking for a birthday present for her brother. She had a blue umbrella, broken on one side, and she laughed when it dripped all over the floor. I loved her almost immediately, though I told myself at the time I was only noticing her.
We became friends because she kept coming back. First for the book, then to exchange it, then for coffee after my shift because she said she hated drinking alone in the middle of the day. We went to Bewley’s when we could afford it and bought cheap tea from Spar when we couldn’t. She talked quickly, with her hands, about everything she wanted to do. Move to Berlin. Write essays. Learn to swim properly. Stop dating men who treated kindness like a weakness. I listened like listening was a talent, like if I did it well enough she might one day look at me differently.
For two years, Aoife was the centre of my small life. We walked through St Stephen’s Green on lunch breaks, sat on the wall by the Grand Canal in summer, shared chips outside Leo Burdock after bad dates she went on with other people. She would ring me at midnight from the back of a taxi, crying or laughing, and I would answer every time. I told myself that was love. Maybe it was. But it was also hope, and hope can make a very patient fool of you.
There was one night in particular that I kept replaying for years. It was December, just before Christmas, and Dublin was bright in that expensive, lonely way it gets. We were in Grogan’s, squeezed into a corner by the window, both of us damp from the walk over. She had broken up with a man called Cian, who wore scarves indoors and spoke about women as if they were weather systems. Aoife was quiet for once. Then she put her head on my shoulder and said, “You’re the only person who never disappoints me.”
I should have heard the sentence properly. I heard only the part I wanted. I thought it was a door opening.
A week later, I bought her a book of Eavan Boland poems and wrote a note inside it. Nothing dramatic. Just the truth, or as close as I could come without frightening myself. I told her I loved her, that I had loved her for a long time, and that I did not expect anything but needed to stop pretending it was only friendship. I planned to give it to her on Ha’penny Bridge, because I was twenty-eight and still capable of making my own heartbreak scenic.
She read the note while the Liffey moved black and silver beneath us. I remember the lights on the water. I remember a group of lads singing badly behind us. I remember her face changing, not with disgust, not even surprise, but with sorrow. That was worse. She closed the book gently, as if it belonged to someone sick.
“I love you,” she said, and for half a second I was foolishly happy. Then she said, “But not like that.”
I nodded. I even smiled. I said all the noble things people say when they are trying to keep their dignity from spilling onto the pavement. Of course. I understand. I don’t want to lose you. Take your time. It’s fine. None of it was fine, but she was crying, and because I loved her, I comforted her for not loving me back.
After that, we tried to continue. That was the part nobody warned me about. Rejection is not always a slammed door. Sometimes it is a room you both keep sitting in, pretending the furniture has not moved. She still texted me. I still replied, but slower. She still told me about work, her mother, the men who messaged her with no punctuation. I still cared. But care had become painful, like touching a bruise to check if it had healed.
The end came in spring. We met in a café near Rathmines, and she told me she had started seeing someone. A woman from her office, kind and funny, with a dog named Nelson. Aoife looked nervous telling me, and I knew she was waiting for me to be good about it. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be the man she believed I was. But something inside me had finally grown tired of being generous at my own expense.
I said, “I’m happy for you, but I can’t be the person you
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