When Maeve moved into my flat in Rathmines, she arrived with two suitcases, a basil plant, and a battered copy of The Country Girls held to her chest like a passport. She had owned better editions, she told me, cleaner ones with unbroken spines, but this was the one she had carried through college, through bad jobs, through the year her father died, through every room where she had ever tried to become herself. I used to tease her that if the place caught fire, she would save the book before me. She would smile and say, “Depends what you’ve done that day.”
We were together for almost four years. Dublin measured us in small rituals. Saturday mornings in St Stephen’s Green with coffee going cold on a bench. Rainy evenings drifting through Hodges Figgis even when we had no money for books. Pints after work near Wexford Street, where she would talk with her hands and make ordinary things sound like revelations. I loved her most when she was reading beside me, one foot tucked under my leg, completely gone from the room and yet somehow more present than anyone I had ever known.
The end did not arrive dramatically. There was no betrayal, no slammed glass, no one else waiting in the wings. It came in the form of exhaustion. We had become two people speaking carefully around the furniture of our disappointment. I wanted certainty. She wanted air. I mistook her restlessness for rejection, and she mistook my fear for control. By the last few months, even kindness had started to sound like an accusation.
The final argument happened on a Thursday evening, over something so small I am embarrassed to remember it. A cancelled dinner. A text answered too late. A silence that lasted through the washing up. Then all the old grievances came out wearing new coats. She said she felt lonely with me. I said she was always halfway out the door. The moment I said it, her face changed, not with anger, but with recognition. As if I had named the thing we had both been circling.
She slept on the couch that night. I did not sleep at all. In the morning, I went out early to buy milk and to give us both the dignity of pretending we were calm. I walked as far as the canal, though it was February and bitter, and watched a swan push through a skin of grey water. When I came back, her keys were on the kitchen table.
She had packed neatly. That was the first thing that hurt me. Her coats were gone from the hallway. Her mug was gone from the shelf. The basil plant was gone from the windowsill, leaving a pale square where the sun had not reached. She had taken the framed photo of us in Galway, the scarf my mother knitted for her, even the chipped blue bowl she said made cereal taste better. But on the bedside locker, exactly where it always lived, was The Country Girls.
I stood there looking at it for a long time. At first, I thought she had forgotten it in the rush. Then I opened it and saw the bus tickets, the receipts, the little pressed leaf from a walk in the Phoenix Park, all still tucked between the pages. Maeve forgot umbrellas, phone chargers, appointments, but she did not forget that book. Leaving it was not an accident. It was either a wound or a mercy, and I could not tell which.
For two weeks, I kept it where she left it. I made tea and did not drink it. I went to work and answered emails as if I were still a complete person. Friends told me to
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
