The envelope arrived on a wet Thursday in Stoneybatter, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as sit in the air and wait for you. I found it bent slightly inside the letterbox, cream paper with my name written in a hand I knew better than my own for a long time. Aoife always made her capital M look like a small gate. I stood in the hallway with my coat still on, listening to the traffic outside and the kettle beginning to complain in the kitchen, and I knew what it was before I turned it over.
We had been together for nearly six years. We met outside a pub on Capel Street, both pretending not to be freezing while our friends smoked. She was from Clontarf, I was from Ballyfermot, and for a while that felt like the whole map of the world had folded itself neatly so we could find each other. We moved into a small flat near Smithfield with a shower that changed temperature whenever anyone in the building flushed a toilet. We had our favourite bench by the canal, our Sunday walk through the market, our emergency chips from Dublin after nights when we said we’d only have one.
Then my father got sick, and I became a version of myself I didn’t recognise. I was always tired, always late, always somewhere else in my head. Aoife tried to reach me in a hundred small ways. She left tea beside me. She booked a weekend away I cancelled the morning of. She asked me questions and I answered with weather reports. When my father died, she held my hand through the funeral in Glasnevin, and afterward, when everyone was gone and the sandwiches had curled at the edges, I told her I couldn’t do this anymore.
I meant the grief. I meant the pressure. I meant being alive in a way that required tenderness. But what came out sounded like I meant her. She didn’t shout. That was worse. She just looked at me as if I had put something down between us that she could never lift on her own. Three weeks later, she moved out. I watched her carry a box of books to a taxi and convinced myself I was doing the noble thing by letting her go.
For two years, I kept not calling her. I saw her once near the Ha’penny Bridge, laughing with a man in a navy coat, and I stepped into a shop selling phone covers until they passed. I heard from mutual friends that she was well, then that she was seeing someone, then nothing. Silence became a room I furnished carefully. I told myself I was respecting her peace. Really, I was protecting my pride.
So when the invitation arrived, I placed it on the kitchen table and made tea. Then I made toast I didn’t eat. Then I went to work and left it there, unopened, like a small animal that might move if I looked away. All day in the office, I thought about it. I imagined her dress. I imagined the church or hotel, the smiling photograph, the man in the navy coat perhaps, standing where I had once assumed I would stand. I was thirty-four, old enough to know better than to feel betrayed by someone else’s happiness, and still my chest had the childish ache of being left out of a future I had abandoned myself.
That evening, I walked home instead of taking the bus. I passed through Smithfield, where the lights were coming on and people were queuing outside restaurants, all of them carrying on with their lives in the rude, necessary way people do. Outside our old building, I stopped. Someone had put plants in the window of our former flat. Healthy ones. I laughed at that, because every plant Aoife and I ever owned had died dramatically within a fortnight. It struck me then that I had been treating our love like it was preserved somewhere, unchanged and waiting, when really life had gone on and grown leaves without asking my permission.
At home, the envelope was still on the table. I sat in front of it for a long time. My hands were actually shaking, which embarrassed me though there was no one there to see. I didn’t open it. Instead, I took out a sheet of paper and wrote Aoife a letter. Not a grand confession. Not a last-minute plea from a film. I wrote that I was sorry for making her carry my grief when I should have let her stand beside me. I wrote that I had loved her badly at the end, not because the love was small, but because I had become small inside it. I wrote that I hoped her day would be gentle and full of people who knew how lucky they were to be in the room.
I posted the letter the next morning from the green box near the Luas stop. Then I carried the unopened invitation in my bag for another week, through meetings, Tesco runs, and one lonely pint in The Cobblestone where a fiddle tune nearly undid me. Finally, on a Sunday, I brought it to the bench by the canal. I thought I might open it there. I thought perhaps I owed myself the pain of knowing every detail.
<
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
