I met Clara on a wet Tuesday evening outside Trinity College Dublin, both of us standing under the same thin shop awning, pretending our umbrellas had not betrayed us. She was from Galway, studying conservation, and I was working in a café near Dame Street, telling myself I was only there until I figured out my real life. She laughed when a bus went by and sent a wave of rainwater over our shoes. I remember that laugh more clearly than I remember my own voice from those days.
We became the sort of couple who walked everywhere because we had no money and, for a while, no need for anything else. We shared chips on the wall outside Grogan’s, read books in St Stephen’s Green, and spent Sundays in the National Gallery when the weather was too miserable for pretending. Clara had a way of noticing small damage in beautiful things: a cracked frame, faded paint, a loose tile in a Georgian doorway. “Everything lasts longer if someone cares enough,” she used to say. I thought she was talking about buildings. I understand now she was also talking about people.
After two years together, she was offered a place on a restoration programme in Florence. It was the kind of chance people make films about, the kind you are supposed to celebrate without a shadow passing over your face. I did celebrate it, at first. We went to a tiny Italian restaurant near Portobello, ordered more than we could afford, and I raised a glass to her future. She cried into her napkin, smiling through it, saying it was only a year and we would manage. I nodded. I said all the right sentences. I did not say the one true thing, which was that I was terrified she would go and become the person she was meant to be, while I stayed behind serving flat whites and blaming Dublin for my own lack of courage.
The weeks before she left were full of small arguments disguised as practical conversations. She wanted to plan visits. I said we should see how money was. She wanted me to apply for jobs over there. I said I didn’t speak Italian. She said love could be ordinary and still brave, but I had built a whole personality around being realistic. In truth, I was not realistic. I was proud. I believed if she loved me enough, she would choose to stay without me asking. I believed if I loved her enough, I would not ask at all. It was a very clean, noble-looking form of cowardice.
The night before her flight, we walked along the Liffey from Ha’penny Bridge toward the Docklands. Dublin was bright with office windows and bus lights, and the river looked black and restless. She stopped near the Samuel Beckett Bridge and asked me straight out, “Do you want me to go?” I can still feel the cold railing under my hands. I can still see the hope in her face, not dramatic, not begging, just open. I said, “I want what’s best for you.”
It was the worst possible answer because it sounded kind and meant nothing. She looked at me for a long moment, and I watched something close in her. Not anger. Not even disappointment. Just a small door shutting. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “Then I’ll go.”
I took her to the airport the next morning. Terminal 1 was too bright, too ordinary for the end of something. People were eating breakfast rolls, children were dragging cartoon suitcases, announcements were folding over each other. Clara wore a green coat and carried a backpack with a broken zip I had promised to fix months before. At security, she hugged me hard. I remember thinking I should say it now. I should tell her I was scared, that I wanted to try, that I had been acting strong because I felt small. Instead, I kissed her forehead and said, “Text me when you land.”
She did. For a while, we survived on messages, photographs of narrow streets, voice notes sent at strange hours. But something had shifted. She was living, properly living, and I was waiting for proof that she still missed me enough. I visited once in November. Florence was golden and impossible, and she was happier than I had ever seen her. That should have made me proud. Instead, I picked fights over nothing. On my last night there, she said, gently, “You don’t want to come with me. You want me to come back and make your life feel safe again.” I had no defence because she was right.
We ended it over a phone call in January, me standing outside a pub in Rathmines with rain getting into my collar, her voice clear and tired from another country. She said she loved me but could not keep shrinking her joy
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
