I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday evening outside Hodges Figgis, both of us pretending the rain wasn’t soaking through our coats. She was standing under the narrow shelter by the door, holding a paper bag against her chest as if it contained something alive. I was there because I had missed my bus and wandered in to avoid going home too early. She asked if I knew whether the 46A still stopped nearby, and somehow that turned into us walking together towards St Stephen’s Green, sharing my umbrella badly, our shoulders knocking like we’d known each other longer than ten minutes.
She told me she had just bought a book about grief, then laughed and said, “Great first impression, I know.” I told her I had once bought a cookbook during a breakup and lived on toast for three months. That made her laugh properly. It was a small sound, but it stayed with me. There was something careful about her, not cold, just careful, like every word had to cross a bridge before it reached me.
We began meeting once a week. Coffee near George’s Street Arcade. Walks along the Grand Canal. A pint in a quiet corner of Kehoe’s where she always sat facing the door. She told me slowly, never all at once, that the man she had loved before me had left during the worst year of her life, when her mother was ill and her own mind had become a place she didn’t trust. She had spent the last year learning how to sleep again, how to answer messages, how to make dinner for one without feeling abandoned by the table.
I thought love meant showing up harder than anyone had before. I thought if I was patient enough, gentle enough, consistent enough, she would feel safe with me and that safety would turn into something simple. But healing is not a door someone opens because you waited politely outside it. It is messy, private work. Sometimes Aoife would be warm and close, her hand finding mine on the Luas like it belonged there. Other times she would disappear into herself for days, sending only one-line messages: “Sorry, bad head today.” I pretended I understood better than I did.
The night everything changed, we were meant to go for dinner on Camden Street. I had booked a table, bought a clean shirt, and arrived early because I was nervous in the hopeful way. She was twenty minutes late, then forty. When she finally came in, her eyes were red and her hair was damp from the rain. She sat down and said, before taking off her coat, “I can’t be someone’s girlfriend right now.”
I remember the restaurant being loud around us, forks tapping plates, people laughing at the next table. I nodded like a calm man, but inside I felt something drop. She reached across and touched my wrist. “It isn’t because I don’t feel anything,” she said. “That’s the problem. I do. And I keep wanting to make you my proof that I’m better. That if I can love you properly, I’m fixed.”
I wanted to say I didn’t mind. I wanted to say I would wait, that she could love me badly and I’d take it. But some small honest part of me knew that wasn’t kindness. It was fear dressed up as devotion. I had fallen in love with her strength, but also with the idea that I might be rewarded for recognising it. That was hard to admit.
We left the restaurant without eating. We walked to Merrion Square, where the paths shone under the lamps and the city felt rinsed clean. Aoife cried, and I didn’t try to stop her. For once I didn’t make a speech. I just stood beside her while she said she was tired of apologising for not being ready. Then I told her I was tired of pretending I needed nothing.
That was our ending, though not in a dramatic way. We hugged at the bus stop on Nassau Street. Her cheek was cold against mine. She said, “You met me in the middle of becoming myself again.” I said, “I know.” The bus came, and she got on, and I watched the red lights
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
