I met her on a February morning at the Forty Foot, the kind of morning when the sea looks like hammered tin and everyone who goes in deserves either praise or medical supervision. I had started swimming there after my father died, not because I was brave or spiritual, but because grief had made my body feel like a locked room. The cold water was the only thing that opened a window.
She was sitting on the steps in a red wool hat, laughing at something an older man had said. I noticed her because she was the only person not performing toughness. Everyone else was gasping, roaring, slapping their shoulders, announcing the temperature as if they had negotiated it personally. She just walked down calmly, dipped a foot in, and said, “That’s rude,” to the sea.
I laughed, and she looked over. “You going in or just here for the theatre?” she asked.
“I’m building up courage,” I said.
“That’s what cowards call waiting.”
I followed her in because pride is a dangerous thing. The water punched the air out of me. For a few seconds I forgot my name, my sadness, the whole long grey stretch of the year. She swam beside me out past the rocks, not far, just enough that the land seemed to loosen its grip. When we climbed out, shaking and pink, she handed me half of her towel because I had forgotten mine.
Her name was Maeve. She was a primary school teacher in Dún Laoghaire, originally from Mayo, living in a small flat near Glasthule. I told her I worked in insurance, which sounded even more lifeless when said out loud beside the sea. We got coffee from a place up the road and stood outside with our hands around the cups, still trembling from the swim.
There was no dramatic confession. We didn’t tell each other our whole histories. But she had a way of listening that made ordinary sentences feel worth finishing. I told her my father used to bring me to Sandycove when I was small and buy me a 99 even if it was raining. She told me her mother rang every Sunday to ask if she had met “any nice Dublin men” and that she always said no, even when she had, just to keep the conversation short.
Before she left, she wrote her number on the back of my coffee receipt. I put it in the pocket of my jacket like it was something official, something that could change the direction of a life. We said we’d meet the next Saturday for another swim.
That evening, I took the DART home, still smelling of salt, and for the first time in months I felt light. Not happy exactly, but available to happiness. At Connolly, I reached for my Leap card and the receipt fell out. A gust of wind caught it, lifted it, and sent it under the train before I could move. I stood there like an eejit, staring at the tracks. Her number was gone.
I went back the next Saturday, and the one after that. I became a regular by accident, always pretending I was there for the swim. I asked one or two people if they knew a Maeve in a red hat, then felt ridiculous and stopped. Dublin is a village until you need it to be one, and then it becomes a continent. I checked the same coffee shop. I walked through Glasthule more often than a man with no business there should. Nothing.
But something had shifted. I kept swimming. I stopped going home every evening to sit in silence with the television on. I met people on the rocks: widows, students, retired guards, nurses coming off night shifts. Cold water people have a strange honesty about them. You can’t pretend to be grand when you’re trying to get your socks on with frozen fingers.
Spring came. Then summer. My father’s anniversary arrived, and instead of taking the day off to hide from it, I swam at sunrise. Afterwards, I bought two coffees out of habit and left one on
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
