I met Niamh on a wet Thursday evening outside Whelan’s, where the queue was curling down Wexford Street and everyone was pretending the rain was grand. She had a blue scarf wrapped around her hair and was laughing at something her friend said, the kind of laugh that made strangers turn their heads without meaning to. I offered her the shelter of my umbrella, though it was one of those cheap ones from Centra that had already surrendered on one side. She said, “That’s not an umbrella, that’s a flag of defeat,” and somehow we were together for nearly three years after that.
We were good in the beginning. We walked the length of the Grand Canal on Sundays, got chips in Rathmines, argued over which pub in Dublin had the best snug, and made plans we had no money for. She worked in a primary school near Drumcondra and I was doing shifts in a hotel near the quays. She had a calmness about her that I mistook for certainty. I thought she didn’t worry because she trusted life. Later I learned she was calm because she had fought very hard to become that way.
I was not calm. I was funny, sociable, generous when I had it, and impossible when I hadn’t. If I felt small, I made noise. If I felt scared, I went out. If Niamh asked me to be home by ten, I heard it as an accusation instead of a request. I would turn one pint into six and arrive back to our flat in Phibsborough full of apologies, wearing that boyish grin I thought could still save me. For a while, it did. She would sigh, make tea, and sit with me at the tiny kitchen table while the buses hissed outside in the rain.
The night that ended us was not dramatic in the way films make endings dramatic. There was no shouting in the street, no slammed door that echoed through the building. It was a Friday in November, and we were meant to go to dinner with her younger brother, who had just come out of hospital after a bad few months. It mattered to her. She told me three times that week. “Please don’t be late,” she said that morning, standing in the hallway with her coat half-buttoned. “I need this evening to be easy.”
I promised. I meant it when I said it. That was the worst part. I always meant it at the moment of saying.
After work, a colleague asked me to go for one in The Long Hall. I told myself I had loads of time. Then another lad joined. Then my phone was face down because I didn’t want to see the time, which is different from not knowing it. By the time I looked, there were seven missed calls and a message from Niamh that said, “We waited. I’m going home.”
I ran across town half-cut, sweating through my shirt in the cold. I got to the flat ready with my speech, the one about stress and work and losing track. She was sitting on the floor of the bedroom with a suitcase open in front of her. Not crying. That frightened me more than tears would have. Her jumpers were folded neatly beside her. The blue scarf from the night we met was on top.
I started talking too quickly. I said I was sorry, that I loved her, that I would change, that this was the wake-up call. She listened with her hands in her lap. When I ran out of words, she said, “I know you love me. That’s what makes this hard.”
Then she said the sentence I still hear sometimes when I pass that old building: “But I can’t keep choosing love if it costs me my peace.”
At first, I thought it was cruel. I thought peace sounded like a small thing compared to what we had. We had history, jokes, rent, favourite songs,
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
