I kept his key on my ring for eleven months after he left. It was a small brass thing, warmer in colour than the others, cut for a red door in Stoneybatter where I once believed I would spend the rest of my life. I told myself I kept it because returning it would be dramatic, and I hated drama. Really, I kept it because it proved that for a while I had belonged somewhere with him.
We met in a queue outside a café near Capel Street on a wet Tuesday morning. He had no umbrella and I had one that turned inside out every time the wind came around the corner. He laughed first, not at me, but with the kind of softness that made being embarrassed feel safe. By the time we reached the counter, we were talking like people who had missed each other for years. He was a paramedic. I worked in payroll for a hotel near the quays. Neither of us had glamorous lives, but together we made ordinary days feel like something you would remember.
Our love was made of little rituals. Friday chips eaten on a bench by the Liffey. Sunday walks through Dublin when the city was still yawning itself awake. A pint in Grogan’s if we could find space, or a quiet drink in The Cobblestone when he wanted music and I wanted to watch his face while he listened. He had a way of closing his eyes during a song, as if he was letting it repair him. I loved him most in those moments, when he stopped trying to be useful to everyone else.
That was the trouble in the end. Everyone else always needed him. His mother. His younger brother. His job. Strangers bleeding on pavements. Colleagues calling at midnight. I admired him for it until I began to feel like one more person waiting in line for whatever was left. He never betrayed me in the obvious ways. There was no other woman, no message discovered, no great scene. He betrayed me by disappearing while sitting beside me. By saying, “I’m grand,” until the words became a wall. By letting me love a version of him he no longer had the strength to be.
The night it ended, we were in his kitchen with the yellow lino and the window that looked onto a wall. I had cooked pasta because it was the only thing left in the press. He came home late, still smelling faintly of rain and hospital disinfectant, and stood in the doorway as if he had forgotten why he lived there. I asked him if he still wanted us. It was the bravest question I had ever asked, because I already knew the answer. He cried before he spoke. That was how I knew he was telling the truth.
“I love you,” he said, “but I don’t know how to be loved right now.”
I wanted to be noble. I wanted to say I understood. Instead, I said, “That’s not enough for me,” and the words shocked us both. I had spent years being proud of needing very little. That night I realised needing love back was not greed. It was life.
He moved out two weeks later, though the flat had been his before it was ours. I stayed one last month because my name was on the lease, and because leaving a place where you were happy is not one act. It is a hundred small removals. His mug from the sink. His jacket from the hook. The dent his body made in the mattress. When I finally left, I forgot to give him the key. Or maybe I didn’t forget at all.
Nearly a year passed. I dated one man who spoke only about crypto, and another who was kind but held my hand like he was checking my pulse. I stopped dating after that. I walked a lot. I learned the names of trees in Phoenix Park. I went to therapy in Rathmines on Thursdays and cried so hard the first day that the therapist handed me the whole box of tissues without pretending I might only need one. Slowly, I became less afraid of silence. Slowly, I stopped imagining him turning up at my door with all the right words.
Then, on a cold evening in November, I saw him outside the Lighthouse Cinema. He was thinner, with a beard I didn’t like and tiredness still sitting behind his eyes, but he looked steadier somehow. We both stopped. There is a strange intimacy in meeting someone who once knew the sound you made in your sleep. For a second, we were back in that old life, and then we weren’t.
He asked if I wanted a coffee
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
