I met Ciarán on a wet Tuesday in Dublin, the kind of rain that makes everyone look down and hurry. I was twenty-six, working in a bookshop near Trinity, and he came in asking for a poetry collection he couldn’t pronounce. He laughed at himself before I could, and I remember thinking it was a rare thing, a man who didn’t mind being a bit foolish in front of a stranger.
He became a regular after that. Every second Thursday, usually just before closing, he’d appear with his bicycle helmet tucked under one arm and ask me what I’d read lately. At first I thought he was lonely. Then I hoped he was looking for me. He had a way of listening that made you feel less ordinary. If I told him I liked a sentence, he wanted to know why. If I mentioned my mother was sick, he remembered the appointment dates. If I said I hated the winter dark, he told me the best view of the city was from Killiney Hill on a clear January morning.
We became friends in the quiet, accidental way people do in Dublin. A pint in Grogan’s after work because the rain was too heavy. A walk through St Stephen’s Green because he had ten minutes before meeting someone. A shared bag of chips at the canal in Portobello, sitting with our knees nearly touching, both of us pretending not to notice.
I loved him for almost three years and never told him. I told myself there would be a right moment, and then I told myself the right moment had passed. He was kind to everyone, which made it harder to know if I was special or just standing close to his warmth. He dated other women, briefly and unsuccessfully, and I became the person he spoke to afterwards. I hated myself for being glad when things ended. I’d go home to my flat in Phibsborough, make tea I didn’t want, and imagine saying it plainly: Ciarán, I love you. In the mirror, it sounded brave. In front of him, it felt like stepping off a pier.
The closest I came was the night before he left for Galway. He had taken a job with an environmental charity, and we met at The Long Hall because he said he wanted one proper Dublin goodbye. He looked happy and nervous, his hair damp from the rain, his coat smelling faintly of smoke and cold air. I had written him a letter that morning and carried it in my bag all day. It said everything I couldn’t say without my voice breaking. It said I loved the way he made room for people. It said I knew he didn’t owe me anything, but I couldn’t let him go without knowing.
We drank two pints each. He talked about the west, about starting over, about how frightening it was to leave a life even when you wanted to. Then, near the end, he reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I’ll miss you most,” he said.
That was the moment. Even now, years later, I know it was the moment. The letter was in my bag, folded inside a book of Seamus Heaney poems. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my throat. But I looked at him, at his open, trusting face, and all I could think was that if I gave him the letter, I might turn his leaving into something heavy. I might make his last night in the city about guilt. So I smiled like a coward and said, “You better.”
At the bus stop on College Green, he hugged me for a long time. Then he got on the bus, waved from the window, and was gone into the orange blur of traffic. I walked all the way home instead of taking the Luas. Near O’Connell Bridge, I took the letter out and read it under a streetlamp. It was honest and aching and much too late. I didn’t throw it in the Liffey like someone dramatic in a film. I brought it home, put it in a shoebox, and cried in the calm, ugly way adults cry when there is work in the morning.
We stayed in touch for a while. Messages, postcards, the occasional phone call. Then life did what life does. He met someone in Galway, a teacher from Mayo with a bright smile. He sent me a photograph of them at a wedding, and I knew before he said it. I told him she looked lovely. I meant it, though it hurt.
Last year, I heard he had died suddenly while swimming, a heart problem nobody knew about. He was thirty-four. The news came through an old mutual friend, and I sat on the floor of my kitchen for nearly an hour, holding my phone, unable to move. Grief is strange when your love was never declared. There is
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