I met him on a wet Thursday outside the Abbey Theatre, both of us pretending we weren’t lost. He had a paper map in his hand, which I found ridiculous and charming in equal measure, and I had a phone with two percent battery and too much pride to ask anyone for directions. We were both looking for the same late-night poetry reading in a small upstairs room near Capel Street. By the time we found it, we were soaked through, laughing like we had already known each other for years.
His name was Ciarán. He worked in a bookshop and had ink on the side of his hand almost every time I saw him. I was doing a course in graphic design and cleaning tables in a café near George’s Street Arcade. We didn’t fall in love dramatically. There was no thunderclap, no sudden confession. It happened in small, ordinary ways. He remembered that I hated coriander. I learned that he got quiet when he was tired, not angry. We walked along the Liffey after shifts, sharing chips from a paper bag, pointing at apartments we could never afford and pretending we were choosing curtains.
For two years, Dublin became our map of little promises. The corner table in Grogan’s where he told me his father had been sick. The bench in St Stephen’s Green where I cried after failing an interview and he made me laugh by pretending to be a very posh career adviser. The top deck of the 46A, where we sat shoulder to shoulder, fogging up the window, making plans to go everywhere. Lisbon first, then Berlin, then maybe New York if we became the sort of people who could casually say, “We’re going to New York.”
But love is not only what you feel for someone. It is also what life asks from you while you are feeling it. His mother got worse first. Then his bookshop cut his hours. Then I got offered a placement in Amsterdam, the kind of opportunity everyone tells you not to be stupid about. I expected him to say, “Go, and we’ll figure it out.” He did say that, at first. We both said many brave things at first.
Long distance made us polite. That was the first sign. We stopped telling each other the ugly parts of our days because phone calls had become too precious to waste on complaints. I would show him the canal outside my flat and he would show me rain on the window in Dublin. We became curators of our own lives, selecting only the pieces that looked bearable. When I came home for Christmas, we stood outside The Long Hall and hugged like relatives at a funeral, both of us smiling too hard.
The end came in March, on a Sunday afternoon in Phoenix Park. I had flown back for a weekend because we had both begun to understand that something needed saying face to face. It was cold but bright, the kind of day that makes Dublin look forgiven. We walked for nearly an hour before either of us mentioned us. He told me he had been offered a manager’s role in the shop. I told him my placement had turned into a job. We were proud of each other, genuinely proud, and that was the most painful part. There was no betrayal to blame, no villain hiding in the story. Just two lives opening in opposite directions.
He said, “I don’t want us to become something we survive.” I remember those words exactly because they annoyed me at first. They sounded too neat, like a line from one of his books. But then he started crying, and Ciarán never cried in a way that asked to be comforted. He cried quietly, looking down at his shoes, as if he was embarrassed to be human. I took his hand. We sat on a damp bench and told the truth. We loved each other. We were tired. We had been holding onto the memory of us more tightly than the reality. Neither of us wanted to be the person who dimmed the other’s future.
So we ended it there, not with a slammed door but with a long walk back towards the city. We stopped for coffee near Heuston Station because neither of us was ready to be alone yet. We talked about ordinary things: his sister’s new dog, my terrible Dutch pronunciation, a film we had both hated but finished anyway. When my train time came, he carried my bag to the platform. I wanted one of us to suddenly change our mind. I wanted the cinematic moment, the rush, the declaration. Instead, he kissed my forehead and said, “Mind yourself.”
For months afterwards, I thought a beautiful love story had to last forever to count. I thought endings made the whole thing smaller. But time softened that idea. Ciarán taught me that love can be real without being permanent. He taught me that being known by someone, even briefly, can change the shape of your life. I became braver because he once believed I was
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
