I met her on a wet Tuesday outside Pearse Station, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and make everybody look slightly defeated. I was twenty-four, carrying a broken umbrella and a cardboard box of office things because I had just been let go from a job I hated but still needed. She was standing under the shelter, eating chips from a paper bag, and she offered me one as if we had known each other for years.
Her name was Aoife. She worked in a bookshop near Grafton Street and had a laugh that made people at nearby tables look over, not annoyed, just curious. We became friends slowly and then all at once. Coffee near Trinity, walks through Dublin when neither of us had money, pints in The Long Hall when one of us did. I loved her before I had the courage to admit it, and by the time I did, she had started seeing a man called Brian who was kind, handsome, and always remembered people’s names.
So I did the very Irish thing of saying nothing and making a ritual out of my silence. Every year, on the anniversary of the day we met, I wrote about her. Not love letters exactly, because I never meant to send them. More like small portraits. One year I wrote about the way she cried during a busker’s version of “The Auld Triangle” on Grafton Street. Another year I wrote about the time she gave her gloves to a woman outside the Abbey Theatre and then pretended her hands weren’t freezing for the next hour. I wrote about her turning thirty in Whelan’s, singing badly and gloriously, and about the Sunday she sat with me in St Stephen’s Green after my father’s funeral, saying nothing because nothing would have helped.
I kept them in a blue notebook at first. Later, when the pages ran out, I saved them in a folder on my laptop called “Receipts,” because I thought no one would ever open something so boring. Every November, no matter where life had moved us, I wrote one. Even during the years we barely spoke. Even when she married Brian. Even when they moved to Galway for a while and I convinced myself I had finally outgrown the habit. I hadn’t. I was not waiting for her, not exactly. I dated other people. I loved other people in smaller, safer ways. But writing about Aoife became a way of remembering the version of myself who could still be surprised by kindness on a miserable day.
Last winter, she rang me out of nowhere. Her marriage had ended, quietly and painfully, the way some things do without villains. She was back in Dublin, staying with her sister in Rathmines, and asked if I’d meet her for a walk. We crossed the Ha’penny Bridge with our collars turned up, talking about ordinary things first because grief needs a side door. Then she told me she felt like she had disappeared inside other people’s expectations. Wife, daughter, dependable friend, cheerful Aoife. “I don’t know who I am when nobody needs me,” she said.
I don’t know why I told her. Maybe because the city looked the same as the day we met. Maybe because we were older, and silence had started to feel less noble and more like a waste. We were sitting upstairs in a quiet pub off Dame Street when I said, “I’ve written about you every year since Pearse Station.”
She looked at me as if I had spoken in another language. I explained badly at first, embarrassed by the size of it. I told her they weren’t creepy, which immediately made them sound creepy. I told her they were private, that she had saved me in ways she never noticed, that the writing
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
