I met Aoife on a wet Thursday in Dublin, the kind of evening when the city seems to lean in close under umbrellas and bus shelters. I was standing outside the Abbey Theatre, pretending to read a poster while actually avoiding going home. My father had died six weeks before, and my flat in Drumcondra had become too quiet. She was beside me, trying to light a cigarette in the rain, laughing at herself every time the flame went out.
“It’s a sign,” I said, though I wasn’t the sort of man who said things like that to strangers.
She looked at me, smiled, and said, “Everything is a sign if you’re desperate enough.”
That was Aoife. Funny, blunt, and softer than she wanted anyone to know. We ended up in The Palace Bar on Fleet Street because neither of us wanted the night to end at a bus stop. She told me she was a nurse in St James’s, working nights, saving money to go to Canada. I told her I was a secondary school teacher who had started leaving papers unmarked because grief had made even red pens feel heavy. She listened without making a sympathetic face. That was the first thing I loved about her. She didn’t try to tidy my sadness.
For three months, we saw each other in the gaps of our lives. Breakfasts after her shifts in Bewley’s, walks through St Stephen’s Green when the mornings were still blue, pints in Kehoe’s where we always promised to stay for one and never did. She’d fall asleep on my shoulder on the Luas, her hand still holding mine, and I would sit perfectly still as if one wrong move might wake the only good thing happening to me.
It sounds romantic now, but at the time it was complicated in the ordinary, painful way life often is. I was not well. I was grieving, drinking too much, saying yes to plans and cancelling them an hour before. Aoife was exhausted, overworked, and carrying her own fear about leaving Ireland. She wanted someone who could stand beside her while she stepped into the next version of herself. I wanted someone to keep me from disappearing into the last version of me.
One Sunday, we took the DART out to Howth. It was windy enough to make us ridiculous, and she tied her scarf around my neck because I’d come out underdressed, as usual. We walked the cliff path, stopping every few minutes to let dogs and families pass. At the top, looking out over the sea, she told me she’d accepted a job in Toronto.
I tried to be happy for her. I really did. I even hugged her and said all the proper things. But inside, something small and selfish folded its arms. I had known Canada was real, but until then it had existed like a weather forecast, not a door she was actually going to walk through.
After that, I changed. I became needy in quiet ways. I asked when she was free, then acted wounded when she wasn’t. I made jokes about her leaving that were not jokes at all. She began to look tired around me, not physically tired, but soul-tired, as if loving me had become another shift she had to survive.
The night it ended, we were outside Whelan’s on Wexford Street. A band had just finished, and the pavement was full of people laughing, smoking, calling taxis. I remember the glow of the chipper across the road and the smell of rain coming before it arrived. Aoife had been quiet all evening. I asked if she was already gone in her head.
She didn’t answer straight away. Then she said, “I think you want me to stay because you’re lonely, not because you’re ready to love me.”
I hated her for saying it because it was true.
I told her she was wrong. I told her I loved her. She cried then, not dramatically, just a few tears she wiped away quickly, annoyed with herself for letting them fall. “I love you too,” she said. “That’s the problem. If I stay, I’ll
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