I met Aoife in a queue outside the Light House Cinema in Smithfield, both of us pretending we understood a French film we had only come to see because it was raining. She had a green scarf, a laugh that arrived before the joke, and the kind of face that made you feel you had known her in another version of your life. I was twenty-six, working in a café near Capel Street, and she was doing admin in the Mater. We became friends quickly, the way people do in Dublin when they keep bumping into each other in small places and start calling it fate.
For nearly eight years, Aoife was my safest person. We had pints in Grogan’s, chips on the wall by the Liffey, Sunday walks through Stoneybatter when neither of us wanted to go home yet. She remembered things I forgot telling her. My mother’s birthday. The name of the song that played during my father’s funeral. The fact that I hated coriander. When I had my first real heartbreak, she came over with a bottle of wine and a loaf of Brennans, because she said soup was too dramatic and takeaway was too expensive.
I never saw what was right in front of me. Or maybe I did, in brief flashes, and looked away because her friendship was one thing in my life I could not risk losing. Aoife was always there, and I mistook that for something ordinary.
She dated other people, though not often. I dated plenty, badly. Every time a relationship ended, I found myself on her sofa in Phibsborough, complaining about women who wanted too much or too little, and she would listen with a patience I now understand must have cost her. Sometimes she would go quiet, stirring tea she had no intention of drinking, and I would ask if she was all right. She always said, “Ah, I’m grand.” In Ireland, that sentence can hide a whole life.
The last winter we had together, she got tired. Not just tired from work, but tired in the bones. She brushed it off at first. Then came the appointments, the scans, the words people say softly in hospital corridors. Cancer. Aggressive. Treatment. Time. I visited her in the Mater after work, bringing magazines she never read and gossip she pretended to care about. She lost weight, then her hair, then some of her brightness, but never her manners. She thanked every nurse like they were doing her a personal favour.
One evening in March, when the sky over Dublin had that pale, washed-out look, she asked me to take her to the Botanic Gardens. She was too weak to walk far, so we sat on a bench near the glasshouses. The place was quiet except for children shouting somewhere and the low murmur of traffic beyond the trees. She had a wool hat pulled down to her eyebrows and her hands tucked inside her sleeves.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
I made some stupid joke because that is what I did when I was afraid. She did not laugh. She looked straight ahead and said, “I loved you for a long time.”
I remember the exact feeling of the bench beneath me, cold through my coat. I remember a man pushing a pram past us and smiling politely. I remember wanting to answer in a way that could undo years. But there was no clever sentence, no film scene, no sudden music. There was only Aoife, pale and brave, and me realising I had been loved with a gentleness I had never earned.
I told her I loved her too. It was true, but not the same kind,
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