I met Aoife on a wet Tuesday evening outside the George’s Street Arcade, both of us pretending we weren’t waiting for the rain to soften. I was holding a paper bag with two second-hand books in it, she was holding a bunch of daffodils like they were a small bright protest against the weather. A bus went by and sent a sheet of water over the kerb. She laughed before I did, and that was the first thing I loved about her, though I wouldn’t have had the courage to call it love then.
We were together for three years before the night I remember best. Not the holidays, not the birthdays, not the Christmas morning with the badly wrapped watch, not even the day we moved into a tiny flat in Phibsborough with a window that rattled in the wind. The night I keep returning to has no photograph, no proof, not even a receipt. Both our phones died before it properly began.
It was late September, the kind of evening Dublin gives you as an apology for all the grey ones. We had gone for a walk after work with no real plan, starting near Trinity and drifting down toward the Liffey. Aoife had been quiet for weeks. Her mother was sick in Galway, my job in a café on Camden Street had cut my hours, and we were doing that thing couples do when they love each other but start speaking only about bills, trains, hospital updates and what’s left in the fridge.
That evening, I thought she was going to leave me. She kept touching the pocket of her coat and looking ahead instead of at me. I had prepared myself to be dignified, which meant I had prepared myself to fall apart later in private.
We crossed the Ha’penny Bridge just as the lamps came on. I remember the river looking almost kind. I took out my phone to take a photo because the sky had opened into pink and gold behind the buildings, but the screen went black. Aoife tried hers. Dead too. “There,” she said, smiling for the first time that day. “Now we’ll have to remember it ourselves.”
We kept walking. Past Temple Bar, where the music was already spilling out of doorways, past tourists in rain jackets and lads shouting outside pubs, past a man playing violin so beautifully on Grafton Street that people stopped mid-step. Aoife put a coin in his case and then, without warning, took my hand and made me dance with her.
I was mortified. I told her I couldn’t dance, and she said, “That has never stopped you from doing anything else badly.” So I danced badly. Right there on Grafton Street, under the watch of strangers and shop windows, with no camera to make me self-conscious and no screen to show me how foolish I looked. She spun once, nearly slipped, caught my shoulder, and laughed into my coat. For a few minutes, all the heavy things waited politely at the edge of the street.
After that we walked to St Stephen’s Green, though the gates were closing and we couldn’t go in. We sat on the low wall outside, sharing chips from a place I can’t remember the name of. The vinegar soaked through the paper. A fox appeared near the railings, bold as anything, and Aoife whispered to it like it was an old friend. That was when she finally took the thing from her coat pocket.
It wasn’t a ring. It was a train ticket to Galway for the following morning, and beside it, a second ticket with my name on it.
“I didn’t know how to ask,” she said. “Mam’s not doing great. I need to be there for a while. I didn’t want to assume you’d come. I didn’t want to ask you to pause your life.”
I had
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