I met her outside the Gaiety Theatre on a wet Thursday evening, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and follow you around. I was twenty-eight, working too many hours in a job I pretended to like, and she was carrying a broken umbrella and laughing at herself as if nothing in the world could truly embarrass her. I offered to walk her as far as Dawson Street, and by the time we reached the corner, I had already started changing small plans in my head to make room for her.
Her name was Clara. She lived in Rathmines, worked in a bookshop near Temple Bar, and had a way of listening that made you confess things you had only meant to hint at. Our first proper date was in Grogan’s. We shared a toasted sandwich, drank two pints each, and talked about leaving Dublin as if it were a person who had hurt us but still knew our secrets. She wanted to go to Berlin. I said I wanted that too, though the truth was I wanted whatever kept me beside her.
For two years, we built a life out of borrowed time. Mornings in her small kitchen with the window stuck open. Walks through St Stephen’s Green when we had no money for anything else. Arguments outside bus stops. Apologies in Spar aisles. Love, I learned, was not always grand. Sometimes it was remembering how she took her tea, or standing on the 16 bus with one hand gripping the rail and the other keeping her steady when the driver braked too hard.
The trouble was that Clara kept growing, and I kept asking her to wait. She applied for jobs abroad. I told her it was bad timing. She wanted to move in together somewhere proper, not just spend half the week between her flat and mine. I told her rents were mad. She wanted me to meet her mother in Galway. I said work was busy. None of my excuses were lies, but they were not the truth either. The truth was that I was afraid of choosing, because choosing meant there would be something to lose.
The last evening began quietly. We met at the Ha’penny Bridge after work because that had been our place, though we never said it out loud. The Liffey was dark and busy beneath us, carrying the city’s lights in broken pieces. Clara was wearing a blue coat I loved, the one with a missing button she refused to fix. She had her hands in her pockets and her face turned away from the wind.
“I got the job,” she said.
I knew straight away which job she meant. Berlin. The word seemed to move between us before either of us said it.
I should have hugged her. I should have said I was proud of her, because I was. Instead, I asked when she was leaving. My voice came out flat, almost accusing. She looked at me then, and I saw something in her face close gently, like a door being shut so it would not slam.
“Six weeks,” she said. “I wanted to tell you first.”
We walked without deciding to, along the quays toward O’Connell Street. I talked too much. I said we could try long distance. I said I might come after a few months. I said things I had never been brave enough to say when they might have mattered. Clara listened, nodding sometimes, crying without making a sound. That was worse than shouting. If she had shouted, I could have argued. Her silence left me standing in front of myself.
At the Spire, she stopped. People moved around us with shopping bags and headphones and Friday-night impatience. The city did not pause for my heartbreak. Clara took off the silver ring I had given her on her last birthday. It wasn’t an engagement ring, nothing that serious, I had told myself at the time. Just a ring. Just a small thing. She placed it in my palm and folded my fingers around it.
“I loved you,” she said. “But I can’t keep loving the version of you that might arrive someday.”
I remember wanting to say that I had arrived, that I was there now, but even then I knew it wasn’t true. I was only there because she was leaving. There is a difference.
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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
