I met him on a wet Thursday outside Dublin Busáras, the kind of evening when the city looks like it has been crying before you have. I had my phone in one hand, a paper bag from a shop on Henry Street in the other, and a voice note from my ex still open on the screen. I had listened to it six times between O’Connell Street and the station, hoping the words would change if I suffered through them enough. They did not. He was sorry. He loved me, but not in the way I needed. He hoped I would understand.
I was twenty-nine, old enough to know people leave, and still young enough to feel shocked when they actually do. We had been together four years. We had a flat in Phibsborough, a favourite table in Grogan’s, and a running joke about getting married only if we could have chips from Leo Burdock at the reception. That afternoon, he told me he was moving to Cork for work and did not want me to come. He said it gently, which somehow made it worse. Cruelty gives you something to fight. Gentleness leaves you holding the door open for the person breaking your heart.
I missed my bus because I could not stop listening to the message. When the next one was delayed, I sat on the bench under the shelter, trying to cry quietly. A man about my age stood a few feet away with a bunch of yellow tulips wrapped in brown paper. He had kind eyes and rain caught in his eyelashes. I remember thinking he looked like someone who had just remembered a birthday too late.
After a while, he said, “You don’t have to reply tonight.”
I looked up, embarrassed and ready to be offended. “Sorry?”
He nodded at my phone. “Whatever it is. You don’t have to answer it while you’re shaking.”
It was such a small sentence, but it went straight through me. All day people had told me what to do. My sister said I should block him. My mother said I should keep my dignity. My best friend said we were going out in Temple Bar and I was not allowed to wear mascara. This stranger did not give me a plan. He only noticed the state I was in.
I laughed, because if I didn’t I would sob. “Is it that obvious?”
“Only to someone who has done the same thing,” he said. “I once listened to a goodbye message so many times on the Luas that a woman offered me a mint.”
That made me laugh properly. He sat beside me, leaving a respectful space between us, and told me his name was Daniel. The tulips were for his grandmother in Fairview. She was in hospital, nothing dramatic, he said, but she liked flowers that looked cheerful without trying too hard. I told him my name was Niamh, and then, because he was a stranger and I owed him nothing, I told him everything. The flat. The four years. The chips-at-the-wedding joke. The way my ex had cried when he ended it, as if I was the one causing him pain.
Daniel listened without doing that thing people do where they wait for their turn to speak. He did not call my ex a villain. He did not call me strong. He did not promise that better things were coming. He just said, “It’s strange, isn’t it, when someone stops choosing you but still wants to be remembered kindly.”
I stared at him. That was exactly it. Not the moving away, not the broken plans, not even the sudden loneliness waiting for me in Phibsborough. It was the unfairness of being asked to bless
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
