I was twenty-six when I learned that a place can keep your secrets better than a person can. It was the summer after I had lost my job in a café near Camden Street, the kind of job I used to complain about until the tips stopped coming and the rent was still due. I was living on a friend’s couch in Rathmines, pretending it was temporary, pretending a lot of things. Then I met Cian again outside Dublin Castle during a free lunch-hour concert, both of us older than we had been in college and somehow less certain of ourselves.
We had known each other years before, not well enough to call it history, but enough that seeing him felt like finding a page torn from an old book. He had been helping his aunt clear out a building near Portobello, above a disused tailor’s shop that was waiting on repairs and paperwork. There was a small apartment at the back, not officially let, not exactly empty either. A bed, two chairs, a kettle that screamed, yellow curtains, and a view of a brick wall softened by ivy. “You could stay there for a week,” he said. “Just until you get sorted.”
I stayed for one week, then two, and then Cian started staying too. At first it was practical. He said it was closer to his work in town. I said nothing because I wanted him there and was afraid saying it would ruin the shape of it. We brought our lives in quietly, a toothbrush each, a bag of coffee, second-hand plates from George’s Street Arcade, a blue blanket from a charity shop that smelled faintly of lavender no matter how often we washed it.
The apartment became our secret because neither of us knew what to call it. We were not tenants. We were not really a couple, not at the beginning. We were two people hiding from bills, families, expectations, and the private fear that adulthood had started without us. In the mornings, we would walk along the Grand Canal before the city had fully woken, sharing a paper cup of coffee because buying two felt extravagant. In the evenings, we ate pasta with butter and black pepper, sitting on the floor with the window open, listening to buses sigh past on South Richmond Street.
There was romance in it, but not the shiny kind. It was damp socks on the radiator, coins counted for milk, laughing too loudly when the electricity tripped and we had to finish dinner by candlelight. It was Cian reading job listings aloud in a dramatic voice to cheer me up. It was me cutting his hair over the sink and making one side much shorter than the other. It was the two of us walking to St Stephen’s Green on days when the walls felt too close, lying in the grass and pretending we were tourists with nowhere to be.
By July, I had found part-time work in a bookshop, and Cian had stopped pretending he only stayed over for convenience. He kissed me one rainy Tuesday after we came home soaked from Dame Street. Not a film kiss, not planned, just two cold people laughing in a hallway that smelled of wet coats and old wood. After that, the apartment felt less like a hiding place and more like something we had built, even if it was built on borrowed time.
The end came in August. His aunt rang to say the repairs were finally starting and the keys needed to be returned. We had known it would happen, but knowing did not make it gentle. For three days, we packed slowly. Every object seemed suddenly meaningful: the chipped mug, the receipt from a late-night takeaway, the note I had left on the kettle saying “don’t let it scream, it’s had a hard life.” On our last night, we didn’t go out. We sat on the mattress with
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
