For nearly four months, every Thursday evening after work, I met the same woman on the number 46A just outside Dublin city centre. I was working in an office near Leeson Street then, doing accounts for a company that sold medical equipment, and by half five I usually felt as if someone had taken a spoon to the inside of my head and scraped out whatever was useful. The bus was my quiet hour. I would sit upstairs if I could, left side, three rows from the front, and watch the city pull itself apart into traffic lights, wet pavements, tired cyclists, and people hurrying home with flowers or bread or nothing at all.
She first sat beside me on a rainy Thursday in October. There were no seats left, and she asked, “Is this free?” in a voice that sounded like she was apologising for having a body. She had silver hair cut to her chin, a navy coat with a missing button, and a brown paper bag from a bakery on Camden Street. I said yes, moved my bag, and we rode in silence until the bus stopped near St Stephen’s Green. Then she looked out at the rain and said, “Dublin is only beautiful when it’s trying to hide itself.”
I laughed because I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. She had the expression of someone who had said something true and was waiting to see if the world would punish her for it. I told her I liked the rain because it made everyone honest. She turned to me then, properly, and smiled. “You’re either young,” she said, “or recently heartbroken.”
I was thirty-two and recently both. My girlfriend, Laura, had left in August after six years together. Not dramatically. There was no affair, no slammed door, no terrible sentence that could be hated forever. She just said she couldn’t picture our future anymore, and the worst part was that when she said it, I realised I couldn’t either. Since then, I had been living in a small flat in Rathmines with half our old furniture and none of the old noise.
The woman did not ask my name, and I did not ask hers. The next Thursday, she was there again, same stop, same bakery bag. She sat beside me as if we had arranged it. “How was your honest rain this week?” she asked. That became the beginning of us. Every Thursday we spoke for forty minutes, sometimes less if traffic was kind, sometimes more if the city was in one of its moods. She told me she once worked in the Abbey Theatre box office, that she hated lilies, that her husband had believed every problem could be solved by walking along the sea at Sandymount. She told me he had died nine years earlier and that grief, if you let it, would redecorate your entire life in its own taste.
I told her things I hadn’t told my friends because friends want to rescue you, and strangers only have to listen. I told her I still bought the coffee Laura liked by mistake. I told her I avoided certain pubs in Ranelagh because we had been happy in them and I found happiness, in memory, more painful than fighting. I told her I was frightened I had become the sort of man people recovered from.
She never softened the truth for me. “You are not a ruin,” she said one evening as we passed the canal, the trees black against the water. “You are a house after a party. Messy, yes. But still standing.”
By December, I looked forward to Thursdays with an ache that embarrassed me. Not romantic exactly, though love is not always romantic. Sometimes love is being seen at the exact moment you have become invisible to yourself. I began saving small stories for her during the week. A child on Grafton Street feeding a chip to a pigeon. A man in Tesco singing along to Wham under his breath. The first morning I woke up and did not immediately remember I was alone.
On the last Thursday before Christmas, she was not at the stop. I waited for two buses and missed both. The rain came sideways. People pushed past me, annoyed by my stillness. I told myself she had plans, family, a cold, a life that did not include explaining herself to a stranger on public transport. But the following Thursday, she was absent again. And the one after that.
I might have let it become one of those unfinished Dublin mysteries if not for the bakery bag. One evening in January, after work, I walked to the bakery on Camden Street.
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
