I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday evening outside Grogans, both of us sheltering under the same narrow strip of awning like two strangers pretending not to notice the rain. She had a blue scarf wrapped three times around her neck and a paper bag of books from Hodges Figgis going soft at the corners. I offered her half my umbrella, and she laughed because the umbrella was already broken on one side. That was the first thing I loved about her: she laughed easily, even when things were falling apart.
We were together for nearly four years. Not in a grand, cinematic way, but in the ordinary Dublin way that becomes a life before you notice. Sunday walks through St Stephen’s Green. Late chips from Leo Burdock after pints we couldn’t afford. Arguments on the Luas about nothing. Her toothbrush beside mine in my flat in Harold’s Cross. We talked about renting somewhere with more light, maybe near the canal, and getting a dog when we were less broke. I thought we were moving towards something solid.
Then, one winter, she began to disappear while still sitting beside me. She stopped making plans. She answered questions with “I’m grand” in that way Irish people do when they are absolutely not grand. I asked if there was someone else. She said no. I asked if I had done something. She said no again, but she wouldn’t look at me.
She ended it in a café near Dawson Street. I remember the spoon in her tea trembling slightly, though her voice was calm. She told me she didn’t feel the same anymore. She said she needed space, that we had become too comfortable, that love shouldn’t feel like habit. I sat there nodding like a reasonable man while something inside me cracked cleanly down the middle. I asked her once, only once, if she was sure. She said she was.
For a long time after, I believed her. That was the part that ruined me. I believed I had been loved and then quietly unloved, like a song she had grown tired of hearing. I moved through the city differently after that. Grafton Street felt too bright. The canal felt staged. Every couple in every pub seemed to be doing love properly while I had somehow failed at it without knowing how.
Two years passed. I got a better job. I moved to Phibsborough. I learned to cook more than pasta. I even started seeing someone kind, a woman named Sarah, who never made me guess what she felt. We were steady in a way that frightened me at first because I kept waiting for the hidden door to open under my feet.
Then Aoife texted me. Just: “Could we meet? I owe you the truth.”
I nearly didn’t go. I stood in my kitchen staring at the phone until the screen went black. But some questions stay alive under everything else, and mine had been breathing there for two years. We met by the benches in Merrion Square on a cold Saturday morning. She looked thinner, older somehow, though still herself. Same blue scarf. Same careful hands.
She told me she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a few months before she left me. At first, the doctors weren’t certain. Then they were. She had been terrified, angry, ashamed of needing help before she even needed it. Her mother had lived with illness for years, and Aoife had grown up watching her father become a carer
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
