I met Aoife on a wet Thursday outside Whelan’s, both of us pretending we were not looking for the same missing taxi. She had a blue scarf wrapped twice around her neck and a way of laughing before the joke had properly landed, as if she trusted life to be funny in the end. I offered to share my cab as far as Rathmines. She said yes, then spent the whole journey telling me she hated people who said yes too quickly.
That was the beginning of us. Not dramatic, not cinematic, just two damp strangers in the back of a taxi, passing Camden Street lights, talking as if we had missed years of conversation and were trying to catch up before the meter stopped. For three years after that, we built a small life in corners of Dublin. Pints in Grogan’s when we could afford them. Chips on the wall near the Grand Canal when we couldn’t. Sunday walks through St Stephen’s Green, where she would name dogs we did not own and futures we were too young to carry.
Aoife loved dancing. I didn’t. I was stiff and self-conscious, the kind of man who needed two drinks to clap in rhythm. But she had no patience for embarrassment. If a song came on in a pub, a shop, even a busker’s tune on Grafton Street, she would take my hand and pull me into the world. “Nobody is watching you,” she would say, though I was certain everyone was. “And if they are, give them something worth watching.”
The last dance we never finished happened in The Cobblestone in Smithfield, on the night before she was due to fly to Berlin for a six-month design course. We had both agreed it was a good thing. I said I was proud. She said we would visit. I said of course. She said nothing would change if we didn’t let it. But all evening there was a third person sitting with us, the future, quiet and rude, taking up space at the table.
There was trad music in the corner, bodies pressed close, coats steaming from the rain. Aoife was brighter than usual, talking too fast, touching my sleeve every few minutes as if checking I was still there. I was quieter than usual, already grieving something I had not lost. When a slow tune came in after midnight, she stood up and held out her hand.
“One for the road,” she said.
I remember the exact shame of it now. I smiled, but I didn’t move. I told her I was wrecked. I told her my knee was acting up, which was nonsense. Really, I was afraid that if I held her then, in front of strangers, I would not be able to let go without begging her to stay. She kept her hand out for a second longer than was comfortable. Then she nodded, sat down, and said, “Fair enough.”
We left soon after. The rain had stopped and the square was shining under the streetlights. At the Luas stop, she kissed me gently, almost kindly, and said she’d call from the airport. She did. We spoke the next morning while she queued for security. I told her to send photos. She told me to learn how to dance before she got back. We laughed. The call ended with boarding announcements and a promise neither of us understood would become heavy.
Berlin changed her, or maybe distance only revealed the changes already waiting. At first we were careful and sweet. Video calls, voice notes, postcards of galleries and strange cafés. Then the calls shortened. Then they became scheduled. Then we began saving up small resentments and spending them all at once. I visited in March and we were polite to each other for four days, like cousins at a wedding. On the last morning, in her tiny kitchen, she cried into a mug of coffee and said, “I think we’re trying to keep a version of us alive that already had its ending.”
I wanted to argue. Instead, I thought of her hand waiting for mine in The Cobblestone, and how I had chosen pride over tenderness. Not because that one moment ruined us, but because it was honest. I had been loving her with my brakes on. She had been asking me to step forward. We ended it there, softly, with no villain to blame. At the airport, she hugged me for a long time and whispered, “You’ll dance with someone someday.” I said, “I should have danced with you.” She said, “I know.”
Two years later, I passed through Smithfield on my way home from work and heard music spilling out of the pub. I almost kept walking. Then I went in. I ordered a drink and stood near the back,
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
