I met Eoin because I was pretending to be braver than I was. It was a wet Thursday evening in Dublin, the kind where the rain doesn’t fall so much as hover around your face, and I had gone into a little writing night above a pub near Camden Street. A friend had signed me up after a breakup and said, “The best approach is to create stories that are honest.” I thought that sounded like something people say when they have never had to stand in front of strangers and read about their own foolish heart.
I nearly left twice. Once at the bottom of the stairs, where I could hear laughter and chairs scraping, and again when I saw the sign-up sheet with ten names already on it. Mine was the eleventh, written in small letters, as if I hoped the page might forget me. Eoin was sitting by the window with a notebook open and a pint untouched in front of him. He had the calm face of someone who had arrived early because he feared arriving late. When I asked if the seat beside him was free, he said, “It is now,” and then looked embarrassed by his own line.
My piece was about a man who kept buying flowers after the person he loved had left him. It was supposed to be fiction, but every detail was mine: the tulips from Moore Street, the silent phone, the stupid hope that love might come back if I made the flat look welcoming. When I read it, my hands shook so much the paper made a small storm. I didn’t look up until the end. There was polite applause, and then Eoin, from the second row, said quietly, “That felt true.”
Afterwards, we walked together toward St Stephen’s Green because neither of us seemed ready to go home. He told me he had started writing after his mother died, not because he wanted to be published, but because grief had made his house too quiet. I told him I had stopped believing in love because I had mistaken being chosen for being safe. He listened in a way that made me keep speaking. Not dramatically, not with big advice, just with his head slightly tilted, as if every word mattered enough to be held carefully.
We began meeting every Thursday. Sometimes we read at the group, sometimes we skipped it and took coffee near George’s Street Arcade. We built something slowly, sentence by sentence. He never rushed me. I never asked him to be cheerful when he was missing his mother. Our love did not arrive like music in a film. It arrived like someone putting an extra scarf in their bag because they noticed you are always cold. It arrived when he remembered I hated coriander, when I remembered the anniversary of his mother’s passing, when we both learned that tenderness is less about grand gestures and more about paying attention.
The incident that changed us happened six months later. I was due to read a new story at the same pub, and this time it was about him. About a man who carried grief like a folded letter in his coat pocket. I had written it with love, but also with fear, because to describe someone is to risk getting them wrong. Before my turn, I panicked in the toilets and decided I couldn’t do it. When I came out, Eoin was waiting by the stairs. He didn’t ask to see the pages. He just said, “If it’s true, read it. If it’s only clever, don’t.”
So I read it. I read about his quiet
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
