I met Cian in September, which was the worst possible month to meet someone you might love. Dublin was all gold leaves and wet pavements, the kind of weather that makes every goodbye feel cinematic. I was twenty-six, working in a bookshop near Grafton Street, and he came in looking for a second-hand copy of Seamus Heaney for his mother. He had paint on his sleeve and an apology ready for everything, even when he had done nothing wrong.
We started with coffees after my shifts, then pints in small corners of pubs where nobody knew us. He showed me the city as if I hadn’t been born in it. We walked through St Stephen’s Green when the leaves were turning, along the canal when the evenings got dark too early, and once out to the Poolbeg Lighthouse in a wind so sharp it made us laugh like children. He said autumn was the only honest season because it never pretended things lasted forever.
By November, he was leaving. His sister had found him work in Berlin for six months, painting sets for a theatre company. He said it was the sort of chance he couldn’t refuse, and I knew enough about wanting more from life not to ask him to stay. The night before he left, we sat outside Connolly Station with two paper cups of tea going cold between us. He promised he’d be back by the next autumn. “First yellow leaf,” he said, brushing one from my coat, “I’ll find you.”
For a while, he wrote. Not long letters, just postcards with crooked handwriting and little sketches in the corners. A bridge. A theatre door. A woman carrying flowers on a tram. He never wrote love in any grand way, but he wrote things like, “Saw a red scarf today and thought of you,” and that was enough to keep a person warm through winter.
Then spring came, and the postcards slowed. By summer, there was nothing. I told myself people got busy. I told myself silence was not always an ending. When September returned, I became ridiculous in ways I only understand now with tenderness. Every afternoon after work, I walked the same route we used to walk. I sat on the same bench in St Stephen’s Green. I watched the airport buses. I looked up whenever someone with his height crossed the road. I wore the red scarf, even on days too mild for it.
He didn’t come that autumn. Or the next.
I wish I could say I stopped after one year, but longing can be stubborn when it has no body to bury. I dated other people, badly and unfairly. I compared their laughs to his. I kept a drawer of postcards tied with twine, as if keeping them neat could keep the promise alive. Every September, without deciding to, I returned to the old places. I would have a coffee near the bookshop, walk through the Green, stand under the trees and feel foolish and faithful at the same time.
Seven autumns passed like that. My mother told me, gently, that some doors are closed even when no one has the decency to shut them in your face. I snapped at her, then cried in the bathroom because I knew she was right. Waiting had become less about Cian and more about the version of myself who had been chosen so clearly for one brief season. I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want to admit that she had been waiting in the cold for someone who had already walked into another life.
The ending came on a wet Tuesday in October. I was in a café near <a href="https://dail
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