We were together nine years when we decided to meet for the first time. That sounds like something a couple says when they are trying to be cute, but we were not cute then. We were tired. We had become the kind of people who texted each other about bins, rent, toothpaste, and whose turn it was to ring Electric Ireland. Love was still in the flat somewhere, but it had gone quiet, like a radio left on in another room.
The idea came on a wet Friday evening in February. We were sitting in our kitchen in Phibsborough, eating takeaway from the containers, both scrolling our phones. Mark laughed at something on his screen and I realised I had not heard him laugh properly in weeks. Not at me. Not with me. Just near me. I said, without planning it, “If you met me now, would you fancy me?” He looked up, shocked, then hurt, then thoughtful. “Would you fancy me?” he asked. We sat there with the rain tapping the window and neither of us answered quickly enough.
So we made a rule. For one weekend, we would pretend to be strangers. No old arguments. No mentioning the leaky shower, his mother, my job, the mortgage we could not afford, or the baby we had stopped talking about after the second miscarriage. We would meet in town on Saturday like two people with no history and see what happened. It was childish, maybe, but so was how we had been sulking around each other, waiting to be rescued.
On Saturday afternoon, I got ready as if I was going on an actual first date. I wore the green dress Mark had once said made me look like I belonged in a painting, though he probably had not noticed it in three years. I took the bus into town and walked down O’Connell Street feeling nervous in a way I had forgotten my body could feel. We had agreed to meet outside the GPO at three. When I saw him, I almost laughed. He was wearing a navy coat I had bought him, but he had shaved properly and put on the aftershave he used only for weddings. He looked handsome, and also like a man trying not to look terrified.
“Are you Aoife?” he asked, holding out his hand.
I shook it. “Depends who’s asking.”
It was awkward for the first ten minutes. Painfully awkward. We walked towards Grafton Street and spoke about safe things: the weather, Dublin traffic, how impossible it was to get a decent coffee after six. But then something loosened. He told me, as if I did not know, that he worked as a carpenter and liked the smell of fresh-cut timber because it reminded him of his grandad’s shed in Swords. I told him I used to write poems before I became a person who answered emails for a living. He stopped walking outside Bewley’s and said, “Do you still?” I nearly said, “You know I don’t,” but that was against the rules. Instead I said, “Not lately. I think I got embarrassed by wanting things.”
We went to St Stephen’s Green and sat on a damp bench, watching ducks behave like they owned the place. He asked me what I wanted from life, the kind of question people ask on first dates before they know the answers are dangerous. I told him the truth because strangers are sometimes easier than husbands. I said I wanted a quieter mind. I wanted a home that did not feel like a waiting room. I wanted to stop being angry at my body. He did not try to fix it. He just looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “That sounds very
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