I met Niamh on a wet Thursday outside Connolly Station, both of us trying to shelter under the same useless strip of awning while the rain came sideways across Amiens Street. She laughed first, which was how most things began with her. I had muttered something about Dublin weather being a personal attack, and she looked up from her phone and said, “It only attacks the dramatic.”
For two years after that, I measured my life in small places we made ours. The back corner of Grogan’s when we could get it. The steps near the canal at Portobello with chips wrapped in paper. Sunday mornings in St Anne’s Park, where she would stop to admire every dog as if it had been sent to her personally. She worked in a bookshop near Temple Bar, and I worked in accounts in an office where the windows didn’t open. She said I had the face of a man permanently waiting for an email. She wasn’t wrong.
The thing I loved most about her was also the thing I feared. Niamh noticed everything. If my voice changed, she heard it. If I was quiet, she knew whether I needed space or whether I was hiding. I grew up in a house where feelings were handled like bills: left on the counter until someone got angry. Niamh came from a family that said everything out loud. At first, it felt like warmth. Later, when I was ashamed of myself, it felt like being caught in bright light.
The row happened in December, the week before Christmas, on Grafton Street. Dublin was all buskers and fairy lights, shoppers moving like a tide between Brown Thomas and Stephen’s Green. Niamh had been talking for weeks about applying for a job in Galway, managing a small independent bookshop. It was exactly the sort of place she belonged: sea air, shelves, conversations with strangers about poems. I told her I was happy for her. I even said I’d visit every weekend. But underneath it, I felt something mean and frightened gathering in me.
That evening, she told me she had been offered the job. Her face was open, almost glowing, and for one second I saw the future asking me to be generous. I failed. I said, “So that’s it then? You’re just leaving?”
She blinked, like I had stepped on something living. “I’m not leaving you. I’m telling you because I want us to decide what it looks like.”
But I was already defending myself against a loss that hadn’t happened. I said she had planned it all without me. I said she always needed things to be more poetic than real life. I said moving away was easier than building something. Even as I said it, I knew I was taking the loveliest parts of her and turning them into weapons.
She didn’t shout. That made it worse. She stood there near the lights, her scarf damp with mist, and said, “I wanted you to be proud of me.”
I remember the sound of a busker singing Fairytale of New York somewhere down the street. I remember a child crying because he had dropped a paper bag. I remember Niamh’s eyes filling, not with drama, but with disappointment so plain it embarrassed me. She waited. I think she was giving me the chance to come back to myself.
Instead, I said nothing.
She nodded once, as if a fact had been confirmed, and walked toward the Luas stop at Stephen’s Green. I followed for a few steps but stopped by the railings. Pride is a stupid little god, but in that moment I worshipped it. I told myself she needed to cool down. I told myself I would ring later. I told myself the apology would sound better if I planned it.
By the time I rang, her phone was off.
The next morning, she texted: I love you, but I can’t keep asking you to meet me halfway and watching you stand still.
I read it in the office toilet because my hands had started shaking at my desk. I wrote sorry about twenty times and deleted it every time. Not because I didn’t mean it, but because the word looked too small for what I had done. I went to the bookshop on my lunch break. Her colleague told me she had taken a few days off. I left a note in an envelope, then asked for it back before leaving because even the handwriting looked cowardly.
She moved to Galway in January. We spoke once before she left, in a café near Trinity, both of us careful and kind in the way people are when something is already broken. I apologised then, properly, or as properly as I could. I told her I had been afraid she would discover a bigger life and realise I was too small for it. She cried a little. I did too. She held my hand across the table, and for a moment I thought forgiveness might turn back time.
But forgiveness is not the same as returning.
She said, “I don’t want you
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
