I wrote the letter on a wet Tuesday in Dublin, sitting upstairs in Bewley’s with a coffee gone cold and my coat still damp across my knees. It was the kind of rain that made Grafton Street shine like someone had polished it for a funeral. I had no plan beyond putting the words somewhere outside my body, because carrying them around had started to feel like carrying a second heart.
His name was Cian. We met in Hodges Figgis when I knocked a stack of poetry books onto his shoe and said sorry so many times he laughed. For nearly three years after that, he was the person I rang when the bus was late, when my mother annoyed me, when the sky over the Grand Canal turned pink and I needed someone else to see it too. He worked in a kitchen off Dame Street and smelled of smoke, rosemary, and whatever soap he bought in Lidl. He loved me in practical ways. He fixed the loose handle on my bedroom window. He walked me home from Whelan’s even when we’d had a row. He always gave me the nicer half of a sandwich and pretended not to notice.
I loved him too, but I was young in the worst way, the way that mistakes intensity for truth. When things got serious, I started testing him. I’d go quiet to see if he’d chase me. I’d pick fights and then act wounded by the damage. He asked me once, sitting on the wall outside St Stephen’s Green, “Do you actually want to be with me, or do you just want me to keep proving I’ll stay?” I remember being furious because he had said the exact thing I was afraid was true.
We ended in a small, ordinary way. No slammed doors. No dramatic betrayal. Just two tired people at a kitchen table in Rathmines, both of us looking at a mug neither of us was drinking from. He said he couldn’t keep loving me like an exam he was always failing. I said something proud and stupid, something like, “Maybe you’re right.” He nodded, as if I had handed him a coat he’d been waiting to put on, and then he left.
For months, I expected him to come back. I imagined him outside my work, under the awning near George’s Street Arcade, with that half-smile he used when he was trying not to apologise too quickly. But he didn’t. His silence was not cruel. It was complete. That was what finally undid me.
The letter took four pages. I told him I was sorry for making love feel unsafe. I told him I had confused being wanted with being well. I told him about the night I saw him across the road near Temple Bar and hid inside a shop because I couldn’t bear for him to see how badly I wanted to say hello. I did not ask for him back exactly, though every line was leaning in that direction. I wrote, “If there is even a small part of you that misses us, I would like to meet. Just once. No pressure. No performance.”
I put it in a cream envelope, wrote his name on it, and carried it around for a week. It came with me on the Luas, to work, to Tesco, to my friend’s birthday in The Bernard Shaw where I laughed too loudly and checked my bag every ten minutes as if the letter might have escaped. Finally, one Friday evening, I walked to the flat he used to share near Portobello. My hands were shaking so much I nearly dropped it into a puddle.
There was a new name on the buzzer.
I stood there for a long time, feeling foolish in front of a door that had done nothing wrong. A woman came out with a bicycle and asked if I
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
