I used to think love was proved by waiting. Waiting for a text back, waiting outside a pub in the rain, waiting for someone to become the person they were on the first night you met them. I met Cian in Dublin on a Friday evening near St Stephen’s Green, when the city had that soft, golden look it gets for about ten minutes before the weather changes its mind. He asked me for a lighter, though he didn’t smoke. Later he admitted he just wanted a reason to speak to me. That small lie felt charming then.
For the first few months, he loved me loudly. He brought coffee to my office on Pearse Street. He held my hand walking over the Ha’penny Bridge. He remembered that I hated coriander and loved old bookshops. If we were in a crowded place, he would look across the room as if I was the only solid thing in it. I had never been looked at like that before, and I mistook being chosen for being safe.
Then he began to disappear in small ways. First it was delayed replies. Then cancelled dinners. Then whole weekends where he was “wrecked” or “not in the headspace.” He never ended things. He just loosened his grip enough to make me reach harder. I became a version of myself I didn’t recognise. I checked when he was last online. I rehearsed casual messages for twenty minutes. I pretended not to care and then cried on the bus home through Rathmines because he had seen my message and said nothing.
My friends were patient at first. Then they got honest. One Sunday, my friend Aoife met me for a walk along the Grand Canal. I spent nearly an hour explaining why Cian was only distant because he was stressed, because his job was intense, because his father was difficult, because he was scared of feeling too much. Aoife listened, then said, “You’re explaining him like he’s a storm. He’s a man. He knows what he’s doing.”
I hated her for saying it because I knew it was true.
The incident that changed everything happened outside a pub in Temple Bar. Cian had invited me to meet him and his friends. I spent ages getting ready, telling myself it meant something that he wanted me there. When I arrived, he was already drunk, laughing with a woman I didn’t know, his hand resting lightly on the back of her chair. He saw me and smiled, but not with surprise or happiness. More like I was an appointment he had forgotten.
He kissed my cheek and said, “You made it.”
I stood there with my coat still on, suddenly aware of how much of myself I had carried into that room. All the hope. All the excuses. All the little humiliations I had folded neatly and called patience. He did not introduce me properly. He did not make space for me. When I went to the bar, I heard him behind me saying, “She’s intense, but she’s lovely.”
Something in me went very quiet.
I didn’t confront him. I didn’t cry. I didn’t perform the pain for him so he could comfort me and keep me hooked for another month. I walked out. It was raining, of course, because Dublin has a talent for dramatic timing. I crossed the street without opening my umbrella and kept walking until the noise of Temple Bar thinned behind me. By the time I reached Dame Street, my phone was buzzing.
“Where did you go?”
Then, “Are you upset?”
Then, “Come on, don’t be like this.”
I watched the messages arrive and felt the strange, frightening relief of not answering. I went home, took off the dress I had chosen for him, washed my face, and slept for ten hours.
The next morning, he called six times. That had never happened before. By lunchtime he was outside my building with flowers from a petrol station, looking pale and romantic in the way men sometimes do when they realise the door they kept half-open might actually close. He said all the things I had wanted to hear for months. He said he was sorry. He said he had been an idiot. He said he loved me, properly, and that seeing me leave had scared him.
For a moment, the old part of me rose up. The part that wanted to be rewarded for suffering. The part that thought this was the scene
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
