I met Aoife in the smoking area of The Long Hall on a wet Thursday in February, though neither of us smoked. We were both hiding from people we had come with. She was wearing a yellow raincoat that made the whole alley look less miserable, and I remember thinking she looked like someone who had learned how to be brave out of necessity. We talked about rent, bad coffee, and the way Dublin can make you feel surrounded and lonely at the same time. By the time her friends found her, I already knew I wanted to see her again.
For nearly two years, we were almost everything to each other. We walked along the Grand Canal after work, ate chips sitting on the wall near Portobello, and spent Sundays in St Stephen’s Green pretending we were the sort of people who had restful lives. But there was always one careful lie between us. She said she was happy taking things slowly. I said I was too. The truth was I loved her completely, in a way that frightened me, and I had convinced myself that saying it would ruin the arrangement we had. She had been hurt before. I had been left before. So we became experts at kindness without honesty.
The day it changed was not dramatic at first. It was a Saturday in late autumn, cold enough that the air felt clean. Aoife asked me to meet her at Sandymount Strand, which was unusual because she hated sand in her shoes and wind in her hair. I knew something was wrong when I saw her standing near the waterline, hands deep in her coat pockets, staring out towards the Poolbeg chimneys as if they might give her instructions.
She smiled when I arrived, but it didn’t reach her eyes. We walked for a while without saying much. There were dogs racing across the wet sand, children in wellies shouting at the tide, couples holding hands with that easy public confidence I had never quite managed. I remember feeling a strange sadness before anything had even happened, like my body understood before my mind did.
Finally, Aoife stopped walking. She looked at me and said, “I got offered the job in Galway.”
I congratulated her too quickly. I heard myself doing it, heard the cheerful lie in my own voice. It was a great job, the one she had wanted for months, working in a community arts project. She had earned it. She deserved it. But all I could think was that the distance between us, already filled with unsaid things, was about to become actual kilometres.
She nodded while I spoke, and then she said, very quietly, “Please don’t be decent right now.”
That sentence broke something open in me. I had spent so long trying to be safe for her, trying not to ask for too much, that I had become dishonest and called it patience. The wind was blowing her hair across her face. I wanted to reach out and move it, but I didn’t. I just stood there, suddenly ashamed of every moment I had pretended not to mind.
I told her I didn’t want her to go without knowing that I loved her. Not in a vague way, not in a convenient way, but in the everyday way. I loved buying oranges with her in Lidl. I loved the serious face she made when choosing pastries. I loved how she cried at radio stories and denied it. I loved how she made room for people, even when she was exhausted herself. I told her I had been afraid that my love would feel like a demand, so I had hidden it, and hiding it had made me smaller.
Aoife cried then, but not the way people cry in films. Her face crumpled like she was annoyed with herself. She turned away, wiped her cheeks with her sleeve, and said she had been waiting for me to say it for a year. Then she laughed, which made me laugh too, though neither of us was happy exactly. She told me she loved me, but she also told me she was going to Galway. She said she couldn’t build a life out of being chosen only at the moment of departure. That hurt because it was fair.
We sat on a low wall until our legs went numb. For the first time, we spoke without performing. She admitted she had kept the job interview from me for weeks because she wanted me to notice she was drifting. I admitted I had noticed and done nothing because doing nothing felt less risky than asking the question. We were gentle with each other, but we did not rescue each other from the truth.
When we walked back towards the village, the sky had turned a pale silver. She took my hand for the last ten
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
