I met Cian on a wet Thursday outside the Dublin City Library, both of us standing under the same narrow strip of shelter like two strangers pretending not to be stranded. He offered me half his umbrella when the rain turned sideways, and I laughed because the umbrella was already turning inside out. That was how it began: badly dressed weather, awkward kindness, and a walk to the Luas where we talked as if we had known each other longer than twenty minutes.
He was gentle in a way I wasn’t used to. He listened properly, not just waiting for his turn to speak. On our first date in Grogan’s, he remembered I didn’t like gin and ordered me a red wine without making a performance of it. He had sad eyes, though I only noticed that later. At the start I mistook them for depth, the way you do when you want a story to go well.
He told me about Aoife on our third date, sitting on a bench near St Stephen’s Green while a busker played a song that made the whole park seem briefly heartbroken. “She died two years ago,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Cancer. We were together since college.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I put my hand over his. He squeezed it once, and for a moment I felt chosen, trusted. I thought grief was something you could stand beside if you were patient enough. I thought love could make room if you entered quietly.
For months, I tried. I learned the shape of his sorrow. Aoife loved lemon drizzle cake, hated cyclists on footpaths, cried at Christmas ads, and once dragged him to Howth in February just to eat chips in the wind. These details arrived naturally at first, little offerings from a life he had lost. I didn’t resent them. I even loved him more for having loved someone so deeply.
But then the memories began to sit between us like another person at the table.
At dinner in a small Italian place near Camden Street, I ordered seafood pasta and he smiled sadly. “Aoife always got that.” When I wore a green dress to his friend’s birthday, he went quiet because, he said later, she had owned one the same colour. On a Sunday walk along the Grand Canal, I pointed at a heron and he told me they had once spent an entire afternoon watching one from that exact spot. Every new moment seemed to open a door into an old one.
I became careful. I avoided songs from certain years. I stopped suggesting places he had gone with her. I edited myself without noticing, trying not to trip a wire in his heart. There is a particular loneliness in sitting beside someone who is kind to you but looking over your shoulder at a ghost.
The worst of it happened in December. We had planned to go to the Christmas lights on Grafton Street, then for a drink. I was excited in a small, foolish way. I had bought him a scarf from a stall near George’s Street Arcade because he was always losing his. When I arrived, he was standing outside Bewley’s, pale and distant.
“I’m sorry,” he said before I had even hugged him. “This was our thing.”
I looked at the lights reflected in the wet pavement, at people rushing past with shopping bags and paper cups, and something inside me softened and broke at the same time. Not because he missed her. I could understand that. But because I realised he had brought me there hoping to be with me, and had found her waiting instead.
We walked in silence to a quiet pub off South William Street. He kept apologising. I told him it was okay, because that is what I always said. Then he took the scarf from the gift bag and cried
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
