I came to Dublin for a woman and pretended for years that I had come for work. That was easier to say at parties. “There are more opportunities here,” I’d tell people, holding a warm bottle of beer in someone’s kitchen in Phibsborough, as if my whole life hadn’t been packed into two suitcases because Aoife had smiled at me once outside a chipper in Galway and said, “You’d like it up here.”
She was from Drumcondra, with a laugh that arrived before she did. We met at a friend’s birthday, and for the first six months we took turns crossing the country every Friday evening. I still remember seeing her at Heuston Station, red scarf, hair blown wild, looking for me in the crowd. There are moments in life that become a little shrine inside you. That was one of mine.
When I moved up, we rented a small flat near the Grand Canal. It had damp in the corners, a shower that screamed through the pipes, and a view of a brick wall. I thought it was paradise. We spent Saturdays walking through Phoenix Park, Sundays hungover in cafés, and winter evenings in pubs where the windows were fogged with breath and rain. She taught me which bus went where, how to cross O’Connell Street without hesitating, and that the best way to survive Dublin was to stop expecting it to be gentle.
For a while, we were gentle with each other. Then life got ordinary, which is where love is properly tested. Her father got sick. My job in a logistics office in Sandyford became a place where I swallowed panic for eight hours a day. Rent went up. Sleep went down. We started speaking in practical sentences. Did you pay the bill? Did you ring your mother? Are we out of milk? The soft words didn’t disappear all at once. They thinned out, like mist.
The night it ended, we were in a pub off Camden Street. Not fighting, which somehow made it worse. Aoife stirred the ice in her glass and told me she had been offered a job in London. She said she needed to go on her own. I nodded as if I understood, but all I could hear was the noise of plates from the kitchen and a man at the bar laughing too loudly. I asked if there was someone else. She looked tired when she said no. “There’s just not enough of me left to keep fixing us.”
I moved out the following week into a room in Rathmines with a mattress, a desk, and a window that wouldn’t close properly. I told everyone I was fine. I went to work. I bought microwave dinners. I answered texts with thumbs-up emojis because they didn’t require honesty. At night, I walked. Along the canal, through Portobello, over bridges where couples leaned into each other without knowing they were hurting me. Dublin became a map of places I couldn’t look at directly.
After three months, I decided to leave. Not just the room, not just the job, but the city. I handed in my notice and booked a coach back west. My mother was delighted in the careful way mothers are when they know victory has come from pain. “You’ll get yourself right here,” she said. I wanted to believe her. I packed my suitcase with the same two hands that had once unpacked it for love.
On the morning I was meant to go, Dublin was soaked in rain. I dragged the suitcase to Busáras, cursing every broken wheel and puddle. I was early, so I stood under the shelter with a coffee I didn’t want, watching people leave and arrive with
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