I met Niamh on a wet Tuesday evening outside Whelan’s, both of us pretending we didn’t mind the rain while waiting for the same late friend. She had a yellow scarf, the kind of bright thing Dublin weather tries to bully out of you, and she was laughing at the busker across the road who had forgotten half the words to “The Auld Triangle.” By the time our friend arrived, Niamh and I had already told each other too much. I told her I worked in a bookshop near Dawson Street. She told me she was a nurse in the Mater and that she hated olives but kept trying them every year in case she had become a different person.
For four years, we built a small life in a flat above a laundrette in Phibsborough. We had a kettle that screamed like it was being murdered, a neighbour who played trad music at midnight, and a plant on the windowsill we both claimed to be keeping alive. On Sundays, we walked the canal with coffees we couldn’t really afford. We fought about money, about socks on the floor, about whether silence meant peace or punishment. But mostly, we were good to each other. She brought softness into rooms I had spent years making hard.
The trouble was not that we stopped loving each other. That would have been easier. The trouble was that love began to ask for different futures. Niamh wanted children someday, a garden, maybe a move to Galway where her sister lived. I wanted to stay in Dublin because my father was ill, and after my mother died I had become the only person who knew the password to his life: his appointments, his tablets, the way he took his tea, the lies he told doctors when he was afraid. I kept saying, “Just another year.” She kept believing me.
Then she was offered a job in a children’s hospital in Toronto. It was the kind of chance she had dreamed of before she met me, before love made her careful. She came home with the letter folded in her bag and stood in our kitchen for ten minutes before showing it to me. I remember the washing machines humming below us, the smell of someone else’s detergent rising through the floorboards, and her hands shaking as if the paper were alive.
“I won’t go if you ask me not to,” she said.
That sentence broke something in me, because I knew she meant it. She would have stayed. She would have stayed and made a noble little prison out of our flat, and we would have decorated it with good intentions. I loved her enough to see the life leaving her in small ways already. She had stopped talking about travel. She had stopped applying for courses. She had started saying “your dad needs you” as if it was the final answer to every question.
I wish I could say I was generous straight away. I wasn’t. For two weeks, I was awful in quiet ways. I forgot to answer messages. I made jokes about Canada. I asked her if she was really sure, then acted wounded when she said yes. One night, after visiting my father in the Mater, I walked all the way to the Liffey and stood on Ha’penny Bridge watching the black water move under the lights. I thought about my mother, who had spent the last months of her life telling me not to confuse being needed with being loved. I hadn’t understood her then. I did that night.
When I came home, Niamh was sitting on the floor beside the dying plant, crying without making a sound. I sat beside her. For once, I didn’t try to fix anything. I told her she had to go. Not because I wanted
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
