It happened on a wet Thursday in November, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as settle on you and follow you indoors. We met outside The Long Hall on George’s Street because it had always been our place for difficult conversations that we pretended were ordinary pints. Niamh was already there when I arrived, standing under the red glow of the pub front, her hood up, her cheeks pink from the cold. She smiled at me, but it was the careful smile people give when they have already cried at home.
We had been together nearly five years. We met in a queue for late-night chips near Dame Street after a terrible work Christmas party. She laughed because I asked for curry sauce and then forgot to collect it. I loved her from small things first: the way she read the last page of a book before buying it, how she always said thanks to the bus driver, how she could make friends with a dog across the road. For years, I thought love was the same as staying. If you loved someone enough, you stayed through every season, every silence, every version of yourselves.
Inside the pub, we found a small table near the back. It was busy, loud enough to protect us but not so loud that we could hide completely. I ordered a Guinness. She ordered a glass of red wine and took off her scarf slowly, like she was delaying the beginning. We talked about work first. Her school had a new principal. My office in Grand Canal Dock was changing systems again. We spoke like neighbours on a bus, not like two people who knew the exact shape of each other’s fears.
Then she said, “I got offered the job in Galway.”
I nodded because I already knew. Not the fact of it, but the feeling. For months she had been looking westward in conversation, mentioning sea air and smaller schools and the ache she felt living in Dublin. I had been doing the opposite. I had just been made permanent in my job. My mother in Raheny was getting older and relying on me more. Every plan I made had roots in the city. Every plan she made had an exit.
“That’s brilliant,” I said, and I meant it, which made it worse.
She looked down into her wine. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m leaving you.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked, but gently. I surprised myself with that.
The truth was we had both been leaving for a while. Not dramatically. There were no affairs, no smashed plates, no unforgivable cruelty. Just a slow turning away. We stopped walking through St Stephen’s Green on Sundays. We stopped sending each other stupid photos from the Luas. We still loved each other, but we had become careful in the same rooms. I think there is a particular loneliness in sitting beside someone you love and realising neither of you knows how to reach across anymore.
She cried first. Not loudly. Just tears slipping down while she tried to keep her face steady. I reached for her hand across the table, and she took it at once, like muscle memory. Her hand was cold. I remember thinking that I had held that hand at weddings, in hospital waiting rooms, on a Ryanair flight during turbulence, outside my father’s funeral when I couldn’t make my legs move. A whole life seemed to sit between our fingers.
“If I stay,” she said, “I’ll resent you. And if you come with me, I think you’ll resent me.”
I wanted to argue, because arguing would have been easier than admitting she was right. I wanted to say we could do long distance, that Galway wasn’t Australia, that trains existed and weekends existed and people survived harder things. But I could see how tired she was. I could feel how tired I was. We were two people trying to keep a beautiful thing alive by asking it not to change.
After the pub, we walked without deciding to. Down past the lights of Grafton Street, where buskers were packing up, then towards the river. The rain had eased into a mist. Dublin looked polished and bruised under the streetlamps. At Ha’penny Bridge, we stopped in the middle, both of us watching the black water move beneath us. There were tourists taking photos behind us and a man cycling past with a Deliveroo bag, and the ordinary world kept going in a way that felt almost rude.
“Do you remember our first flat?” she asked.
“The one with the mould?”
“The one with character,” she said, and laughed through her tears.
We stood there naming things we had survived: the mouldy flat in Phibsborough, the year I lost my job, her panic attacks during lockdown, the stray cat we fed for three months before discovering it belonged to a woman two doors down. It wasn’t a list of failures. That was what broke my heart.
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
