I met her because the rain was doing what Dublin rain does best, pretending it was only a drizzle while soaking everyone to the bone. I was outside Pearse Station with a broken umbrella, a paper bag of groceries turning soft in my hands, and a mood so foul I could nearly hear it. She was standing beside me, laughing at the sky as if it had told her a private joke.
“You’re losing the battle there,” she said, nodding at my umbrella.
I looked at the bent spokes and said, “I was never really in it.”
That was how Clara came into my life, with wet hair stuck to her cheeks and a laugh that made a miserable Tuesday feel briefly chosen. We ended up walking the same direction, through Dublin streets shining under traffic lights, and by the time we reached Grafton Street, I had told her more than I usually told people in a year. She was in Dublin for eight weeks, working on a theatre project near the Liberties. I was thirty-four, working in an office off Grand Canal Dock, and quietly convinced that the best parts of my life had already happened to other people.
We said goodbye outside St Stephen’s Green. I thought that would be it. Some people enter your day like a song from a passing car, lovely and gone before you can name it. But the next evening I saw her again in Grogan’s, sitting at a small table with a notebook and a pint she was barely drinking. She looked up, smiled like she had been expecting me, and said, “Still dry?”
After that, we stopped pretending it was accidental. We met after work. We walked along the canal in Portobello. We ate chips too late on Dame Street and listened to buskers near Temple Bar. On Sundays, we took the DART to Howth and climbed until the city looked small enough to forgive. She told me she was leaving for Berlin at the end of November. I told her I didn’t do long-distance. She said she didn’t do staying. We made rules, sensible ones, the kind people invent when they are already breaking them. No promises. No future talk. No dramatic airport scenes.
Of course, love ignored all of that.
It wasn’t loud with us. It was in the way she remembered that I hated coriander. It was in the way I began carrying a spare umbrella. It was in her falling asleep on my shoulder during a film and me not moving for an hour because I didn’t want to disturb her. It was in the silence after she told me her mother had died when she was twenty, and in the silence after I told her I had spent years avoiding anything that might hurt me because I had mistaken numbness for peace.</
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
