I met her on a January morning at the Forty Foot, the kind of morning when the sea looks less like water and more like a dare. I had gone there because my father had died three months earlier and I had started doing strange, stubborn things to feel alive. Cold swims. Long walks. Sitting alone in cafés in Dún Laoghaire pretending to read books I couldn’t focus on.
She was standing on the rocks in a red swimming hat, laughing at herself because she had forgotten one glove. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing, stepping down with quick confidence, gasping, dipping, rising. I was still in my coat, holding a towel like a man who had made a promise to someone braver and was now trying to find a legal way out of it.
She looked over and said, “If you wait for it to feel like a good idea, you’ll be here until April.”
That was the first thing she ever said to me. Her name was Maeve. She was a primary school teacher from Harold’s Cross, divorced, fond of bad coffee and old churches, and she had a way of looking directly at you that made small lies feel embarrassing. I told her I was grand when I wasn’t. She smiled as if she recognised the language.
We swam for less than a minute. It felt like being thrown into a different life. When I came out, my hands were shaking so badly I could barely get my socks on. She laughed again, not at me exactly, but with the generous delight of someone who had seen the sea humble plenty of men before. Afterwards we walked towards Sandycove, both of us wrapped in towels and winter coats, steam rising off us like we were two cups left on a windowsill.
We had coffee near the station. I remember the fog on the glass, the tiny table between us, and the odd relief of telling a stranger the truth. I told her my father used to bring me to the pier when I was small and buy me a 99 even when the wind would nearly take the flake out of it. I told her how, after he died, I kept hearing his keys in the hall. Maeve told me she had spent a year pretending her marriage ending was a “fresh start” when really it had felt like being misplaced in her own life.
We didn’t make it dramatic. There were no big declarations. But when we parted at the DART, she wrote her number on the back of a receipt with a borrowed pen and said, “Only text if you’re not going to be weird about it.”
I was weird about it, of course. I waited two days, then sent a message so carefully casual it may as well have been drafted by a committee. She replied in nine minutes. For the next six months, we met all over Dublin. We walked through St Stephen’s Green in the rain, ate chips on the wall near Teddy’s, and once spent an entire evening in a pub off Camden Street arguing about whether love was a decision or a weather system.
With Maeve, grief didn’t vanish, but it changed shape. It stopped being a locked room and became something I could carry outside. She never tried to fix me. That was her kindness. She would simply sit beside me when I went quiet, or take my hand at traffic lights, or send me photographs of ridiculous dogs she saw on her way to work.
By summer, I had fallen in love with her in the ordinary way, which is to say completely. I knew how she took her tea, how she hummed when she was thinking, how she got cross at cyclists on footpaths but always apologised to them under her breath. I thought love would announce itself like a storm. Instead, it arrived like routine. Tuesday swims. Friday pints. Sunday walks. Her scarf left on my chair.
Then, in September, she told me she had been offered a teaching post in Galway. A small school, a better contract, closer to her sister and her mother. She said it gently, but I could see she had already decided. I wanted to be noble. I wanted to say all the correct things about opportunities and fresh starts. Instead, I went quiet in that awful way
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
