I used to think soulmates were a thing people said when they wanted ordinary love to sound holy. I believed in timing, effort, patience, paying rent on time, remembering how someone takes their tea. But one person made me doubt myself, and then losing her made me believe in everything I had spent years laughing at.
I met Maeve outside Whelan’s on a wet Thursday in October. I was twenty-nine, late for a friend’s gig, and she was standing under the awning with a broken umbrella and a paper bag of chips from Camden Street. She offered me one as if we had known each other all our lives. I said no, then took three. She told me I looked like a man who apologised to furniture after bumping into it. I told her she looked like trouble with a bus pass. She laughed so hard a chip fell onto the pavement, and for some reason I remember thinking, this is the warmest sound in Dublin.
We were not dramatic people. We did not run through airports or kiss in the rain, though there was plenty of rain. We built our love out of small things. Sunday walks along the Grand Canal. Cheap noodles after work. Arguing over whether the best view in the city was from Killiney Hill or the top deck of the 46A. She always chose the bus because, according to her, “real romance has condensation on the windows.”
Maeve was a primary school teacher in Phibsborough, the sort of person who remembered every child’s birthday and kept plasters in every handbag she owned. I worked in a print shop near Capel Street and considered myself practical, almost proudly unpoetic. When she called me her soulmate after three years together, I actually winced.
“Don’t make that face,” she said, lying across our couch in Stoneybatter with a book open on her chest.
“It’s a big word,” I said.
“It’s only big if you’re scared of it.”
I told her I loved her more than anyone, which was true, but I did not believe the universe had picked us out for each other. She rolled her eyes and said, “Fine. I’ll be your well-matched administrative partner.” Then she kissed my forehead and went back to reading.
We got engaged without a grand plan. It happened in the kitchen. She was making toast, I was fixing the loose handle on a drawer, and the ring was in my sock drawer waiting for a proper moment that never arrived. She was singing badly to the radio, and I suddenly could not bear another day of not asking. She said yes with butter on her thumb. We celebrated with pints in The Cobblestone, where she told strangers at the next table before she told her mother.
Six months later, she found the lump.
That sentence still feels too small for what it did to us. It was a tiny, private thing at first, something she mentioned while brushing her teeth. Then came appointments, scans, words I had heard before but never inside my own life. We tried to stay ourselves. She named the chemo chair “Mildred.” She wore bright scarves and made jokes with nurses in St Vincent’s. I carried tote bags with snacks, chargers, clean socks, and a terror I could not put down anywhere.
People say illness teaches you what matters. I think it also shows you what you already knew and were too lazy to honour. I had wasted so much time acting as if love could be measured by how sensible it sounded. But in hospital waiting rooms, when Maeve slept with her hand open on the blanket, I understood there was nothing sensible about the way I needed her to keep existing. It was not dependency. It was recognition. Like some part of me had been walking beside her all along, and only fear had kept me from naming it.
One evening in March, after a stretch of bad news, she asked me to take her to the sea. We drove to Sandymount Strand because she said she wanted “the kind of beach that looks like it’s thinking.” The tide was far out, the Poolbeg chimneys stood red and white in the distance, and the wind made her eyes water. She was too weak to walk far, so we sat on a bench wrapped in coats.
“Do you believe in soulmates yet?” she asked.
I tried to smile. “You’re very persistent for a dying woman.”
“I’m not
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
