I used to think a marriage ended in a solicitor’s office, with signatures and a woman in a grey suit sliding tissues across the table. Ours ended on a wet Tuesday evening in Phibsborough, two years before either of us said the word divorce out loud.
We had been married for eleven years. Nothing dramatic had happened, not in the way people expect. There was no affair discovered through a careless text, no plate smashed against the kitchen wall, no bags packed at midnight. There was just a slow quietening. The kind that enters a house like damp and settles into the walls before you notice the smell.
That evening, I was coming home from work on the Luas, soaked from the short walk between stops because Dublin rain has a way of getting under every collar. I had bought a paper bag of pastries from a bakery near Smithfield, an apology without words. We had argued that morning about the electricity bill, but really it had been about everything else: the way he no longer asked how my mother was, the way I answered his questions before he finished them, the way we moved around each other in our little kitchen like strangers in a hostel.
When I opened the door, the flat was warm and smelled of onions frying. For a second, I felt foolishly hopeful. He was at the cooker, sleeves rolled up, humming along to the radio. There had been years when that sight would have undone me. I would have gone up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, pressed my face into the back of his shirt, and he would have laughed and told me I was freezing.
Instead, I stood in the hall holding the soggy pastry bag and realised I did not want to go near him.
He turned and said, “You’re late.” Not angry. Not even annoyed. Just noting a fact.
I said, “The Luas was packed.”
He nodded. I put the pastries on the table. He stirred the pan. We ate dinner across from each other with the radio still on, filling the spaces we no longer knew how to cross. Outside, buses hissed along the road. Somewhere upstairs a child was practising scales on a keyboard, the same five notes over and over.
Halfway through the meal, he told me he had been offered a six-month contract in Cork. He said it like he was telling me the post had arrived. He did not say, “What do you think?” or “Could we manage?” or “Would you come with me?” He only said the money was decent and it might lead to something permanent.
I remember looking at his hands. I had known those hands since we were twenty-three, when we met outside a pub in Dublin after a friend’s birthday, both of us laughing at nothing, full of the great arrogance of being young and wanted. Those hands had held mine through my father’s funeral in Glasnevin. They had painted our first rented bedroom in Stoneybatter a terrible blue because the tin was on sale. They had once searched all of Henry Street for a pair of gloves I said I liked and then pretended it was no effort at all.
Now they rested beside his plate, ordinary and distant.
I asked, “When would you go?”
He said, “End of the month.”
There it was. Not the ending, exactly, but the door appearing in the room.
I could have cried. I could have accused him of planning a life without me. I could have said I was lonely, that I had been lonely for so long I had started talking to the woman in the corner shop longer than necessary just to feel listened to. But something in me had tired beyond speech.
So I said, “That sounds good for you.”
He looked up then, properly. His face changed, just slightly. I think he heard it too, the absence in my voice. He waited for me to add something, to soften it, to turn it into a question. I didn’t.
After dinner, we washed the dishes together. He washed, I dried. It was almost tender, the old choreography of it. He handed me a plate. I wiped it. He handed me a glass. I put it in the press. When our fingers touched, neither of us pretended it meant anything.
The next week, he packed two suitcases. We told people it was temporary. My sister said the distance might do us good. His mother said Cork wasn’t the moon. We smiled and agreed. On the morning he left
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
