It began with the sort of rain Dublin does best, not dramatic enough for an umbrella, but persistent enough to ruin your mood. I had taken shelter outside a café on Grafton Street, pretending to check my phone while really trying not to cry. My marriage had become a quiet house with two people moving around each other like furniture. We still said “milk?” and “your mother rang,” but nothing that could reach the heart.
He asked if I was in the queue. That was the first thing. Not romantic, not clever. Just a man in a navy coat, holding a book under his arm, asking if I was waiting for coffee. I said no, then yes, then laughed because I had made a mess of answering a simple question. He smiled like he had all the time in the world. His name was Ciarán. He worked in an office near Trinity College, and he was buying a flat white before a meeting he didn’t want to attend.
I was forty-two then, with two teenagers, a husband who slept facing the wall, and a version of myself I missed so badly it felt like grief. Ciarán was not handsome in the obvious way. He had tired eyes, a crooked front tooth, and a voice that made ordinary sentences feel private. We drank our coffees standing under the awning. Ten minutes became twenty. I told him I worked part-time in a solicitor’s office. He told me he had recently separated. When I said I was married, he looked down at his cup and nodded. He did not flirt after that. Somehow, that made it worse.
For a week, I thought about him. I told myself it was nothing, a city encounter, one of those small meetings that dissolve as soon as you cross the street. Then I saw him again near Brown Thomas, and he lifted his hand as if he had been expecting me. We walked as far as St Stephen’s Green. We talked about safe things at first: films, books, the price of everything, how Dublin had changed and yet still managed to feel like a village when you were trying to avoid someone. Then he asked, “Are you happy?”
I should have walked away. Instead I told the truth.
The affair did not start in a hotel room. It started in little permissions. A text about the rain. A coffee on a Tuesday. A walk at lunchtime when I said I was going to the bank. I began to wear perfume again. I bought a red scarf I didn’t need. My daughter noticed and said, “You look nice, Mam,” and the guilt landed in me so hard I had to sit down at the kitchen table.
Ciarán never asked me to leave my husband. That was part of what made me stay. He was gentle with my life, even as I was tearing it. We met in places where nobody knew us, cafés off South William Street, a quiet corner of a pub near Temple Bar before the tourists filled it. Once, after too much wine, we kissed in a laneway and I felt twenty-one and ancient at the same time. It was not only desire. That would be easier to explain. It was being seen after years of feeling like a domestic appliance with a pulse.
But secrets have weight. They don’t stay tucked away. They come home in your coat pockets and sit beside you at dinner. I became jumpy with my phone. I snapped at my son over nothing. My husband
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
