I met Clara on a wet Tuesday in October, the kind of Dublin day that makes everyone look like they are apologising for being outside. We had arranged to meet in Bewley’s on Grafton Street, though “arranged” is probably too neat a word for it. She had sent a message after nine months of silence saying, “I’ll be in town tomorrow. Coffee?” and I had replied “Yeah” with the confidence of a man who had not slept properly since.
We had been together for four years, long enough to have habits instead of dates. We knew which side of the bed we liked, how the other took tea, which jokes were only funny after midnight. We broke up the previous Christmas in my flat near Portobello, not because anyone had done anything unforgivable, but because we had slowly become two people standing on opposite banks of the same river, waving politely while drifting apart. She wanted London, then maybe Berlin. I wanted to stay near my father, whose heart had started acting like an unreliable bus timetable. Neither of us wanted to say the word sacrifice, so we used other words instead: timing, space, growth.
When I saw her in Bewley’s, sitting upstairs by the window, I forgot every calm sentence I had practised on the Luas. She was wearing a green coat I had bought her from a charity shop in Rathmines, and her hair was shorter. She smiled as if she was both happy and sorry to see me. That was Clara all over. She could make one expression carry a whole conversation.
We ordered two coffees and a slice of carrot cake we pretended was for sharing, though she always ate the icing first and I always let her. For a while we spoke like tourists in our own lives. Work. Rent. Her new place in London. My father’s appointments in St James’s. The weather, which was doing its best to be mentioned. Beneath it all sat the real question: did you miss me enough to change anything?
Then she reached into her bag and took out a small envelope. My name was written on it in her careful, leaning handwriting. “I wrote this in January,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I should give it to you.”
I did not open it. I just held it between my fingers and felt suddenly angry, not at her, but at time itself. At the way it keeps moving even when you have asked it, very reasonably, to stop. I wanted to say I had been grand, that I had gone to gigs in Whelan’s and pints in Grogan’s and long walks along the Grand Canal, and that none of it had felt like waiting. Instead I said, “I thought you’d forgotten me.”
She looked down at her coffee. “I tried.”
That sentence did more damage than any argument we ever had. I think because it contained love and failure in equal measure. We sat there with the noise of cups and chairs around us, and for a moment I could see the life we might have had if one of us had been braver or more selfish. Sunday mornings. Damp runners by the door. Her plants dying despite her optimism. My father calling her “that fierce one” with affection. Ordinary things, which are the hardest to lose because they do not announce themselves as precious at the time.
She told me she had been offered a permanent job in London. A good one. The kind of job she used to describe while lying on my floor, waving her hands at the ceiling as if the future was something she could sketch in the air. She was leaving properly this time. Not half leaving, not “we’ll see.” Properly.
“I wanted to tell you in person,” she said.
I nodded, because I did not trust my voice. The coffee between us had gone cold. Outside, people moved down Grafton Street under umbrellas, each one carrying a private weather. I opened the
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