I found the letter on a Tuesday morning, beside the kettle, held down by the sugar bowl we bought in a charity shop on Camden Street. It was raining in that soft Dublin way that makes the windows look tired. I remember the toaster had popped, the Luas bell was faint in the distance, and her red scarf was gone from the chair. That was how I knew before I even opened it.
We had been living in a small flat near Portobello, above a barber who played Joe Dolan every Saturday morning. I worked in a bookshop off Grafton Street and she worked nights in a hotel near Grand Canal Dock. Our schedules were bad for love, but for a while we made them seem romantic. I would leave her coffee in a flask. She would leave me drawings on the fogged-up bathroom mirror. We were both broke, both stubborn, and both convinced that being in love was enough of a plan.
The letter was only one page. Her handwriting leaned forward, like it was trying to leave before the words did. She wrote that she was sorry, that she could not become the version of herself she needed to be while staying with me. She said I had done nothing wrong, which somehow felt worse than blame. At the end she wrote, “Please don’t come looking. I don’t know how to say goodbye to you without staying.”
I sat on the kitchen floor and read it three times. Then I rang her. Straight to voicemail. I rang again. Then her sister. Then the hotel. Nobody gave me anything. By noon, I was walking through St Stephen’s Green with the letter folded in my coat pocket, feeling like the city had betrayed me by carrying on. People were eating sandwiches. Buses were sighing at traffic lights. A man was feeding pigeons as if my life had not just split cleanly in two.
For months, I was angry in ordinary places. Angry in queues. Angry on wet buses. Angry in pubs where we had once sat too close together, sharing chips and private jokes. I stopped going to Whelan’s because the first time we kissed was in the smoking area there, under a heater that barely worked. I avoided the canal because she used to say the swans looked like rich old ladies. Dublin became a map of injuries.
The worst part was not knowing where to put the love. If someone dies, people understand that you are grieving. If someone leaves with a letter, they expect you to get over it because at least they are alive. But alive where? Alive as who? I imagined her in Cork, in Berlin, in a room with better light. I imagined her missing me and not missing me. Both hurt.
Nearly a year later, I saw her at Connolly Station. I was coming back from visiting my mother in Clontarf, carrying a bag of laundry because I was twenty-nine and still pretending that was normal. She was standing near the departures board with shorter hair and a green suitcase. For a second, neither of us moved. Then she smiled, not happily, but gently, like someone opening a door only a little.
We went for tea in a café nearby. There was no dramatic explanation. No secret affair. No illness. No grand reason that would make the letter easier to forgive. She told me she had been disappearing inside our life, becoming quieter and smaller, and she did not know how to leave without breaking both of us in person. She said she had moved to Galway, started studying again, and had spent most of that first winter hating herself for
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
