I met Aoife on a wet Thursday evening outside the Abbey Theatre, both of us pretending we were too grown up to be bothered by the rain. She had no umbrella. I had one with a broken spoke that made it lean like a tired bird. We laughed about it, and I walked her as far as the Luas stop at Marlborough. By the time she got on, I knew her coffee order, the name of her childhood dog, and that she had recently ended something with a man called Ciarán who “didn’t know what he wanted.”
For the next year, I made it easy for her to be loved. That sounds noble, but it wasn’t. I was doing it because I wanted to be chosen. I learned the small things. She hated coriander. She got quiet every February because her mother had died that month. She liked sitting upstairs on the bus, at the front, because it made Dublin feel like a film. When she had panic in her chest, I met her at St Stephen’s Green and walked loops with her until her breathing settled. When her boiler broke, I brought over a heater from my flat in Phibsborough and slept in my coat because she looked exhausted and I didn’t want to leave her alone.
People said we were good together. Her friends liked me. Her father, a quiet man from Raheny, shook my hand after Sunday dinner and said, “You’re steady, anyway.” At the time, I took that as a blessing. Steady felt like a compliment. Safe felt like love when you had spent years watching other men arrive like storms and leave like smoke.
The trouble was that Ciarán never fully left the room. Not physically. I only met him once, outside a pub in Ranelagh, all charm and leather jacket and the kind of confidence that made you hate yourself for noticing it. But he was there in her silences, in the way her face changed when a certain song came on, in the messages she turned over on the table before answering. She told me she was over him. I believed her because I needed to.
On our second Christmas together, I decided to propose. It embarrasses me now, not because I loved her, but because some part of me thought a ring could settle the question that her heart would not. I bought it from a small jeweller near Grafton Street. Nothing flashy. A simple gold band with a tiny old diamond, the kind she once said looked like it had “a life before you.” I carried it in my coat pocket for three weeks, taking it out at night and opening the box in the dark like a fool checking if hope was still inside.
I was going to ask her after dinner in a restaurant near Grand Canal Dock. It was freezing that evening, the water black and glossy, office lights shining across it. She wore a green coat I loved, and she kept rubbing her hands together because she’d forgotten her gloves. During dessert, her phone lit up. She turned it face down too quickly. I saw the name anyway.
Ciarán.
I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t shout. I didn’t accuse her. I just said, “Do you still love him?”
Her face did something I had never seen before. It didn’t look guilty. It looked relieved, as if I had finally opened a door she had been standing behind for months.
She said, “I love you.”
I said, “That’s not what I asked.”
The restaurant was full of people pretending not to listen. A waiter came near us, saw our faces, and drifted away again. Aoife started crying, quietly, which somehow made it worse. She told me Ciarán had written to her. He was back in Dublin. He wanted to meet. She hadn’t said yes, but she hadn’t said no either. Then she said the sentence that ended us, though we stayed at the table another twenty minutes after it.
“With you, I know I’d be okay.”
It sounds harmless. Maybe even kind. But I heard the rest of it. With him, she felt alive. With me, she felt safe. I was the warm house after the fire, not the person she ran toward before the flames began.
I took the ring box out of my pocket under the table and kept it in my fist until the corners dug into my palm. I never showed it to her. I paid the bill because I needed something practical to do, something with numbers and receipts and a card machine. Outside, by the canal, she reached for my hand. I let her hold it for a moment, then I slipped away.
We walked to the taxi rank in silence. Before she got in, she said, “I don’t want to lose you.”
I said, “
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
