Galway Stories

People used to say they wanted what we had. They said it at weddings, at house parties in Rathmines, over pints after work, always with that same little sigh, as if myself…

I met Clara on a wet Thursday evening outside Trinity College Dublin, both of us pretending we were not lost. She was holding a broken umbrella like it had personally betrayed her,…

I met her on a wet Thursday outside Whelan’s, the kind of night when Dublin looks like it has been varnished in rain. She was laughing under a broken umbrella, trying to…

I knew I was in trouble the first time he made tea in our kitchen as if he lived there. It was a wet Thursday in Rathmines, the kind of evening when…

I was twenty-nine, living in a damp little flat off Clanbrassil Street, and engaged to a woman who knew exactly how I took my tea. That sounds like a small thing until…

I met her on a Tuesday morning at the Forty Foot, which is not the kind of place I ever expected to meet anyone. I was there because my doctor had told…

I met him in Dingle when I was twenty-three and convinced my life in Dublin was only a temporary thing. I had a summer job pulling pints in a small pub off…

For almost a year, I thought I was being loved in the most patient way a person could be loved. He would wait outside my office near Grand Canal Dock with two…

I used to think heartbreak had to come with a clear ending. A suitcase by the door, a final argument, a text that said we were better off apart. When my three-year…