I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday outside Whelan’s, both of us pretending we weren’t waiting for the same taxi. She had a paper bag of chips under one arm and was laughing at nothing in particular, the way people laugh when rain has already won. I offered her my umbrella, which was useless because it had turned inside out somewhere on Camden Street. She said, “That’s not an umbrella, that’s a surrender flag,” and I loved her from that sentence onwards.
We were together for four years. We lived in a small flat in Rathmines above a dentist, where the bedroom window rattled whenever the bus went past and the hot water had moods. We had our places. Coffee near Portobello. Walks along the Grand Canal when one of us needed to say something difficult. Pints in Grogan’s when we had money, cans in the flat when we didn’t. It was not a grand love, not the kind that looked impressive from outside, but it was steady. Or I thought it was.
Aoife was the more capable one, though she never said it. She worked in a pharmacy and studied at night, hoping to get into a research programme in Berlin. I worked in a print shop near the Liberties, mostly doing flyers for gigs and menus for restaurants, and I told myself I was happy enough. The truth was I had become comfortable standing beside her light without making any of my own.
When the acceptance email came, she read it three times at the kitchen table. I could see her hands shaking. She had been offered a place, funding included, starting in September. She cried before she smiled, and I knew the crying was because of me.
“We can make it work,” she said immediately. “I don’t have to go. Or I can defer. Or you could come.”
I said all the right things at first. I told her I was proud. I opened the cheap prosecco we had been saving since Christmas. We walked to St Stephen’s Green the next day and sat by the pond, making plans we both knew were made of paper. I would look for work in Berlin. She would find us a room. We would learn German from an app and become the kind of couple who owned matching bicycles.
But in the weeks after, I watched her shrink around the idea. She stopped talking about the lab. She stopped mentioning Berlin at all unless I brought it up first. When her mother asked about it over Sunday dinner in Clontarf, Aoife said, “We’ll see,” and looked at me like she was asking permission to have a future.
That look did something to me. Not all at once. It worked on me slowly, like damp in a wall.
I had loved being needed by her. I had mistaken it for love itself. Aoife reminded me to call my father, to eat dinner, to send invoices, to go to the dentist downstairs even though it was literally beneath us. She held me together after my brother died, when I spent six months moving through Dublin like a ghost with a Leap card. She never complained. She just kept placing cups of tea beside me and opening curtains.
But grief had become an old coat I refused to take off, and she had been carrying the weight of it too. Berlin was the first thing in years that belonged only to her. I could see that if I asked, even silently, she would stay. And I could also see that one day she would hate herself for it, then me.
The night I left, we had fought over nothing. A suitcase, really. She had taken it down from the wardrobe, then put
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
