I found it on a wet Tuesday evening in Rathmines, the kind of evening when the rain seems to come sideways and everyone on the bus looks personally betrayed by the weather. I was sitting at our kitchen table, half-watching the steam rise from a mug of tea, half-helping my younger sister set up a dating app on her phone. She had moved back to Dublin after a breakup in Galway and was trying to be brave about starting again.
“Swipe for me,” she said, sliding the phone across the table while she went to check on the oven. I remember laughing because it felt harmless, almost girlish, like we were teenagers again whispering in our shared bedroom. I swiped past men holding fish, men on mountains, men saying they were “fluent in sarcasm.” Then my thumb stopped.
There he was. My husband, Conor. Same blue jumper I had bought him in Arnotts. Same smile he used when he wanted to get out of trouble. His name was changed to “C,” but it was him. Thirty-eight. Living in Dublin. Looking for “something easy, something real.” The photograph had been taken on Sandymount Strand, on a Sunday when I thought he had gone for a run to clear his head.
For a few seconds I could hear nothing except the rain tapping the window. My sister came back into the room and saw my face before she saw the phone. She said my name softly, like I had fallen. I handed it to her and she went pale. The chicken burned in the oven while we stood there in the small yellow kitchen, both of us staring at a stranger who had my husband’s face.
Conor and I had been married nine years. We had met outside Grogan’s after a Christmas party, both pretending we weren’t freezing. He was funny in a quiet way, the sort of man who remembered how you took your coffee and put his hand on your back when crossing a road. We had survived rent increases, his father’s illness, my mother’s death, two rounds of IVF that ended in grief, and the silent year that followed when our flat felt too full of things we never said.
That was why it hurt in a complicated way. It wasn’t only jealousy. It was the feeling that while I had been standing beside him in our sorrow, he had opened a door and stepped somewhere else without telling me.
I didn’t ring him straight away. My sister wanted me to, but I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing his normal voice. I put the phone face down and walked out into the rain. I walked from Rathmines towards the canal with no coat, past cyclists cursing at puddles and students laughing under one umbrella. By the time I reached Portobello, my hair was stuck to my cheeks and my hands were shaking.
Conor found me later on the bench near the water. My sister had called him. He came running, breathless, still in his work shoes. The moment he saw me, he knew. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He just sat beside me and said, “I’m sorry.”
There are apologies that make things better and apologies that confirm the damage. His was the second kind.
He told me he had made the profile three months earlier. He said he hadn’t met anyone. He said he had messaged two women but stopped. He said he didn’t know what he was doing, that he felt like a ghost in our marriage, that he missed being wanted by someone who didn’t also know all his failures. I listened to him and felt something harden inside me. Not because he was lonely. I understood lonely. I had been sleeping beside it for years. What I couldn’t understand was why
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
