I left the journal on the windowsill of her flat in Portobello, beside a dying basil plant and a mug with a crack through the handle. I did not leave it there on purpose, though for a long time she believed I had. I was twenty-nine then, old enough to know better, young enough to still confuse silence with dignity. We had been arguing all winter, mostly about things that sounded small when repeated back. The way I came home late from work. The way she answered texts with one word. The way both of us could sit in the same room and make the air feel crowded.
Her name was Niamh, and she had the kind of face that made strangers soften their voices. We met outside a pub on Camden Street after a night of rain, when the pavement shone like black glass and everyone was pretending not to be cold. She asked me for a lighter, then laughed when I said I did not smoke. “So you’re just standing here dramatically?” she said. That was the first thing I loved about her. She could make me feel seen without making me feel exposed.
For two years, we built a small life out of ordinary things. Sunday walks along the Grand Canal, cheap dinners near Rathmines, films at the IFI when we could afford them, coffee in St Stephen’s Green when we could not. I kept a journal through all of it, not because I was wise, but because I was frightened of forgetting myself. I wrote when I was anxious, when I was jealous, when I wanted to say something to Niamh but did not know how to survive her answer.
The night I left, it was lashing. Proper Dublin rain, the kind that seems to come sideways out of the dark. We had argued because she had been offered a job in Galway and had not told me she was considering it. She said she was tired of asking my permission to want things. I said something cruel about her always needing an escape route. She went quiet then, and I knew I had found the wrong sentence and thrown it like a stone.
I packed a bag in the bedroom while she stood in the kitchen. I remember the blue light of the Luas passing outside, the hiss of tyres on wet road, the basil plant trembling every time the window frame shook. I took shirts, a toothbrush, my charger. I forgot the journal. Or maybe some hidden, cowardly part of me wanted her to find the words I could never say out loud.
I stayed at my brother’s place in Drumcondra for three nights. On the fourth morning, Niamh texted me: “I read it.” Just that. My stomach dropped so fast I had to sit on the edge of the bed. There were things in that journal no one was meant to see. Petty things. Fearful things. A page where I wrote that loving her felt like standing too close to the sea. Another where I admitted I sometimes started arguments when I felt her drifting, because anger was easier to hold than uncertainty. I had written about her mother’s illness, her panic attacks, my resentment, my shame. I had written the truth without kindness, which is a dangerous kind of truth.
I expected rage. I expected her to tell me never to come back. Instead she asked to meet at the benches near the canal, the ones where we used to sit with takeaway coffees and watch dogs behave like minor celebrities. I arrived early and saw her walking toward me in a green coat, holding the journal against her chest as if it were something wounded.
She did not sit down at first. She stood in front of me and said, “You made me a villain in some pages.” I opened my mouth, but she lifted her hand. “And in others, you loved me better than you ever did in person.”
That was the sentence that broke me. Not dramatically. There was no collapse, no grand confession. Just a quiet loosening, like a knot finally giving up. I apologised for what I had written, and then for what I had not said. I told her I was scared she would leave and that I had been punishing her in advance. She said reading the journal hurt, but it also showed her how lonely I had been beside her. Then she admitted she had been lonely too.
We stayed there for nearly two hours, with buses passing behind us and rainwater sliding off the railings. She gave the journal back to me. A few pages had small pencil marks in the margins. Beside one line where I had written, “I don’t think she knows how much I need her,” Niamh had written, “I did. I just needed to be needed gently.”</
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
