I met Lina on a wet Tuesday evening outside Temple Bar, though neither of us was going in. I was sheltering under the shallow doorway of a closed souvenir shop, pretending to check emails while waiting for the rain to soften. She stood beside me with a broken umbrella hanging from her hand like a defeated bird. After five minutes of silence, she laughed and said, “Dublin doesn’t rain. It negotiates.”
I had been single for nearly three years then, by choice and also by fear. My last relationship had ended in a way that made me suspicious of warmth. I had learned how to be pleasant, busy, unavailable. I worked in a print shop near Aungier Street, went home to Rathmines, cooked the same four dinners, and told people I was peaceful. I was not peaceful. I was just undisturbed.
Lina was from Valencia and had been in Dublin for eight months, working in a café near Trinity while taking English classes. She had a way of looking at things as if they were not permanent, which should have warned me. That evening, when the rain finally eased, we walked together as far as the Ha’penny Bridge. She said she liked it because it looked too delicate to carry so many people, and yet it did. I remember that sentence more clearly than I remember my own reply.
We began meeting without ever naming what we were doing. Coffee after work. A slow walk through Phoenix Park on a Sunday when the deer stayed at a distance like shy thoughts. Chips eaten from paper near Christchurch. One pint in Grogan’s, where she drew faces on napkins and made me keep the ugliest one because she said it looked honest. Nothing dramatic happened. No declarations. No grand scene under streetlights. It was gentler than that, which somehow made it more dangerous.
My friends didn’t understand. “Are ye together?” they asked. “Is she staying?” “What’s the plan?” I had no answers that sounded sensible. Lina was due to leave in September. Her visa was almost finished. She missed her mother, the sea, the oranges from her grandfather’s garden, the way Spanish people argued in kitchens. I knew all of this. I knew it from the start. Still, every time she tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled at me across a table, the facts became less important than the feeling of being seen without having to perform.
The love I had known before always came with explanations. We were the same age. We wanted the same things. We had friends in common. We made sense on paper. With Lina, nothing made sense. We had different countries, different languages, different futures. She hated planning and I planned even my lunches. She believed in signs. I believed in bank statements. She cried easily at buskers on Grafton Street. I used to cross the road to avoid feeling anything in public.
One evening in August, we went to the Forty Foot because she wanted to swim before she left Ireland. The sky was low and silver, and the water looked like something that would take your breath and not give it back. She jumped in first, shrieking when she came up, laughing so hard that strangers laughed with her. I stood on the rocks, half dressed, suddenly embarrassed by how much I loved her. Not desired her, not needed her, not imagined a convenient future with her. Loved her. In that foolish, helpless way that arrives before permission.
When I finally jumped, the cold hit me like truth. I came up gasping, and she swam towards me, her face bright
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
