I met Aoife on a wet Thursday outside Connolly Station, both of us sheltering under the same broken awning as if Dublin had arranged the introduction. She laughed when a bus sprayed the kerb and soaked my shoes, and I remember thinking that nobody had ever made humiliation feel so light. We were together for nearly four years after that. We lived in a small flat near Rathmines, fought over whose turn it was to buy milk, learned each other’s silences, and built the kind of ordinary life that feels permanent until the day it isn’t.
When she left, she did it kindly, which somehow made it worse. There was no betrayal I could hate her for, no dramatic scene to replay and win in my head. She simply sat across from me at our kitchen table, hands wrapped around a mug she never drank from, and said she loved me but could not stay in a life that was making both of us smaller. I was working too much, drinking too often, pretending I was fine with a sadness I had been carrying since long before her. She had tried, she said. She had tried until trying began to turn her into someone she didn’t recognise.
I nodded like a reasonable man, then fell apart after she closed the door. For months, I moved through Dublin like a ghost with a Leap Card. I went to work, came home, bought cans in the Centra, and sat by the window listening to buses sigh past in the rain. Friends asked me to come out to pubs in Temple Bar or meet for coffee near St Stephen’s Green, but I kept saying I was busy. I wasn’t busy. I was disappearing.
The night everything changed was in late November, bitter cold, the kind that gets under your coat and into your bones. I had gone for a walk along the Grand Canal because the flat felt too full of her absence. Her books were gone, but I could still see the spaces they had left. Her blue scarf was not hanging by the door, but my eyes still looked for it. I walked and walked until I reached a bench near Portobello, and I sat there longer than I should have.
I won’t dress it up. I was thinking dangerous thoughts. Not loud ones, not cinematic ones, just a quiet exhausted feeling that I could not see a road back to myself. My phone had been buzzing in my pocket, and I ignored it. Then it buzzed again, and again. Finally I pulled it out, angry at the interruption, and saw Aoife’s name on the screen.
I nearly didn’t answer. Pride is a strange thing, even when you are at the edge of yourself. But I did.
She didn’t say hello. She said, “Where are you?”
I told her I was out walking.
“Where?” she asked, and something in her voice frightened me. Not panic, exactly, but certainty.
I lied at first. I said I was near home. There was a pause, and then she said, very softly, “Don’t do that to me. Please. Tell me where you are.”
I don’t know how she knew. Later she told me she had woken from a dream and felt sick with worry, then saw that I had sent her a message earlier in the evening that didn’t sound like me. It was just three words, “I’m sorry, Aoife,” but she understood what I had not even understood I was saying. She rang my brother, then my best friend, then me, over and over until I answered.
I told her where I was. Twenty minutes later, she arrived in a taxi wearing an old grey coat I remembered too well. She didn’t run to me or throw her arms around me. She sat beside me on the bench, close enough that our shoulders touched, and said, “You don’t have to be okay tonight. You just have to stay.”
Those words did something no advice had done. They made the night smaller. They made the next five minutes possible.
Aoife brought me to the Mater emergency department. She stayed with me under the fluorescent lights while I shook with shame. She spoke when I couldn
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
