I met Niamh on a wet Thursday evening outside Whelan’s, both of us pretending the rain was not getting through our coats. She was laughing at something her friend had said, head tilted back, one hand holding a cigarette she never lit. I remember noticing her before I knew anything about her. That is not the most poetic beginning, but it is the honest one. I liked the way she stood, as if the whole street had to make room for her.
Inside, the place was too warm and loud. We ended up beside each other at the bar because two strangers had moved at the same time and left a gap just big enough for a conversation. She asked me if I was always that serious or only when ordering a pint. I told her I was saving my personality for later. She smiled, and that was the moment I stopped noticing the music.
For the next few weeks, everything felt easy because it was mostly attraction. We walked through Dublin with no real destination, getting coffee near George’s Street Arcade, chips after midnight in Temple Bar, and Sunday air in St Stephen’s Green. We kissed in doorways like teenagers though we were both in our thirties. I liked how alive I felt around her. She liked, I think, that I listened when she spoke about the future she wanted.
The trouble was that our futures were not the same place. Niamh wanted movement. She had applied for a job with an arts organisation in Berlin and talked about living abroad the way some people talk about coming home. I had just moved back to Dublin after years away, mostly to be closer to my mam in Raheny, whose health had become uncertain. I wanted roots. She wanted wings. For a while, we pretended this difference made us interesting instead of incompatible.
The incident that changed us happened on a Friday in January. We had planned dinner near Camden Street, but my mam rang just as I was leaving work. She had fallen in the kitchen, nothing broken, but shaken badly. I cancelled on Niamh with a short message because I was panicking and had no room left in me to explain. She sent back only, “Go. Call me later.”
I did not call later. I sat in A&E with my mam until after two in the morning, then brought her home, made tea, and slept in the armchair by the radiator. When I woke, there were three missed calls from Niamh and one message asking if I was okay. I felt ashamed, not because I had done something cruel on purpose, but because I realised how little space I had made for her real concern. Attraction had made me charming. Stress had made me small.
The next day, she came to Raheny with soup, brown bread, and a bunch of daffodils that were far too early for the season. My mam loved her immediately. Niamh washed cups, found the good plates without asking, and sat beside my mother listening to stories about Dublin in the seventies as if there was nowhere else she needed to be. Watching her there, gentle and capable, I felt something deeper than desire. I felt admiration. It scared me more.
That evening, we walked along the seafront at Clontarf. The wind was hard and clean, and neither of us spoke for a while. I told her I could not go with her if the Berlin job came through. She said she had known that, but had been waiting for me to say it. Then she told me something I had not wanted to hear: she could not stay just because I was a good man going through a difficult time. Love, she said, should not become a reward for suffering.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her attraction could grow into anything if people tried hard enough. But the truth was standing
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
