I met Aoife in the smoking area of The Long Hall on a wet Thursday when neither of us smoked. She was waiting for her sister, I was pretending I didn’t mind being alone, and we both stood under the small strip of shelter watching rain polish the pavement on South Great George’s Street. She had a laugh that made people turn around, not because it was loud, but because it sounded like she had just remembered life was worth the bother.
For six months after that, Dublin belonged to us in little pieces. We drank coffee near St Stephen’s Green, ate chips on the wall outside Trinity, and walked along the Grand Canal when we couldn’t afford to do anything else. She was training to be a primary school teacher. I was working in a bookshop and telling everyone I was a writer, though I wrote mostly excuses in my head.
Aoife was brave in a way I didn’t understand then. If she missed me, she said it. If she wanted to see me, she asked. If something hurt her, she didn’t dress it up as a joke. I admired that and feared it. I came from a house where love was shown by fixing the boiler, not by saying the words. So every time she stepped closer, I found a reason to step sideways.
One evening in November, she told me she had been offered a teaching post in Cork. We were sitting upstairs in a quiet pub near Dame Street, the windows fogged, our coats steaming on the backs of chairs. She said she didn’t know whether to take it. Then she looked at me in that steady way of hers and said, “Give me a reason to stay.”
I can still feel the silence that followed. It had weight. It sat between us like a third person.
The truth was simple: I loved her. I loved the way she underlined books she borrowed and returned them full of arguments. I loved how she bought birthday cards weeks early but was always late to the party. I loved that she knew the names of the bus drivers on her route. But I was twenty-seven and terrified that saying it would mean I had to become the kind of man who deserved it.
So I said, “Cork isn’t that far.”
She nodded as if I had answered a different question, one she already knew the answer to. We arranged to meet the following Friday at the Ha’penny Bridge. She said if I had anything else to say, I should say it then. “I’ll wait until seven,” she told me. “But not forever.”
All week I rehears
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