I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday outside Dublin Castle, both of us pretending we hadn’t just been stood up by the same walking tour. She laughed first, which saved me from having to be charming. We went for coffee near George’s Street Arcade, then a pint in Grogan’s, and by Christmas she had a toothbrush in my flat in Phibsborough and a way of saying my name that made ordinary evenings feel chosen.
The holiday was meant to be our first proper one. Not a weekend in Galway, not a night in a hotel after a wedding in Wicklow, but a real holiday with boarding passes and sun cream and the kind of optimism you buy in Boots at Dublin Airport. We chose Lisbon because she wanted tiled streets and I wanted grilled fish and neither of us had enough money for Italy. I remember her at the gate, reading a paperback with sunglasses on her head, looking like somebody already halfway into a better life.
For the first two days, it was beautiful in the effortless way other people’s cities can be beautiful. We climbed hills, got lost, ate custard tarts standing up, and took photos we never posted. At night we sat outside little bars where nobody knew us, and because nobody knew us, we said more than we usually did. She told me she sometimes felt lonely beside me. I told her I sometimes felt I was disappointing everyone before they’d even asked anything of me. We were both honest, but not yet kind.
On the third evening, after too much wine and a tram ride where we barely spoke, she told me she had been offered a job in Berlin. She had known for three weeks. She said it wasn’t decided. I heard only that she had imagined a life without me and had managed to keep eating breakfast beside me on the North Circular Road as if nothing was changing. I reacted badly. Not shouting, exactly, but worse in some ways: cold, precise, wounded in a way that wanted to wound back.
I asked her why she’d come on the holiday if she was leaving. She said, “Because I wanted us to have something good before we had to decide.” That sentence should have softened me. Instead, it made me cruel. I told her she was always halfway out the door. She told me I only loved her when she made me feel safe. Then she stood up from the table, left money under her glass, and walked away into a narrow yellow street.
I let her go. That is the part I still dislike about myself. I sat there for maybe ten minutes, proud and frightened, waiting for her to come back and prove something. When she didn’t, I went looking. Lisbon had turned huge and unfamiliar. My phone was nearly dead. I walked up streets that seemed to fold into other streets, past closed shops and couples holding hands, rehearsing apologies that sounded noble in my head and useless out loud.
I found her near a viewpoint, sitting on a low wall with her knees pulled up, crying quietly. There was a man playing guitar somewhere behind us, which sounds made up, but life has terrible timing like that. I sat beside her and said I was sorry. She said she was sorry too. Then we stayed there for a long time, not fixing anything, just watching the city lights tremble.
The next morning, we went to the beach like people in an advertisement for forgiveness. We swam. We bought peaches. We took a photo of our feet in the sand. But something had shifted. Love was still there, absolutely, but it had become visible as a thing with edges. Before that holiday, I thought love meant building the same future. After it, I understood it could also mean standing close to someone while their
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