I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday in Stoneybatter, the kind of rain that makes everyone look like they are apologising to the sky. I had ducked into a small café near Manor Street because my shoes were soaked through, and she was sitting by the window with a book open but not being read. She was watching people hurry past with their collars up, smiling to herself as if she knew something the rest of us had missed.
There were no empty tables, so I asked if I could sit opposite her. She said yes before looking up, and when she did, she laughed because I was holding my broken umbrella like a dead bird. That was our beginning. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just rain, bad timing, and two strangers with nowhere better to be.
For the next eleven months, Dublin became a map of us. We walked through Phoenix Park on Sundays and invented histories for the people passing by. We shared chips outside Grogan’s after too many pints and argued about whether the best part of the city was the noise or the corners where you could escape it. She loved the Ha’penny Bridge at night, when the lights softened everything. I preferred Sandymount Strand, where the city seemed to loosen its grip and let you breathe.
Aoife was a nurse in the Mater, and I was working in a print shop off Camden Street, pretending I was only doing it until I figured out what I really wanted. She had a steadiness I admired. I had a restlessness she said made her feel brave. We were good for each other in the way people can be when they meet at the right moment, but not necessarily for forever.
The thing about us was that we never lied. Not properly. We avoided things, yes. We turned sentences into jokes. We filled silence with plans for dinner, films, cheap flights we never booked. But underneath it all, we both knew there was a date approaching that neither of us wanted to name.
Aoife had applied for a nursing position in Vancouver before we met. It had been her dream for years, long before I appeared with my broken umbrella. When the offer came through, she told me in Merrion Square, sitting on a bench under trees that were just beginning to turn gold. She cried before she finished the sentence, which made me love her more and made everything worse.
I tried to be noble at first. I told her she had to go. I said it quickly, like ripping off a plaster, before the selfish part of me could ask her to stay. She looked at me as if she wanted me to say the opposite. Maybe she needed to know I would fight for her. Maybe I needed to know I was not the kind of man who would make someone smaller to keep them close.
The last month was the strangest happiness I have ever known. We did everything deliberately. We went back to the café where we met and ordered the same coffees. We took the DART to Bray and walked the head with the wind throwing her hair across her face. We stood outside Whelan’s one Friday night listening to music leak through the walls because the gig was sold out and neither of us minded. Every ordinary thing felt lit from behind because it was becoming memory while it was still happening.
On her final evening, we went to Sandymount. She said she didn’t want a big goodbye at the airport, with announcements and security queues and both of us trying not to fall apart under fluorescent lights. So we walked the strand at low tide, our shoes sinking slightly into the wet sand, the Poolbeg chimneys standing in the distance like two red-and-white full stops.
I had written her a letter, but when I handed it over, she shook her head and tucked it into her coat pocket. “I’ll read it on the plane,” she said. Then she gave me one of her earrings, a tiny silver star, because she had lost the other one months before in my flat and claimed it was probably living behind the radiator with my ambition.
We didn’t make promises we couldn’t keep. That was the kindest thing we did. We didn’t say we would call every day or wait forever or find our way back no matter what. We said thank you. We said I love you. We
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