People used to tell us we looked like the kind of couple Dublin was invented for. Rain on the windows, two pints on a small table, his hand over mine like a promise. We had a little flat near Portobello, a favourite corner in The Long Hall, and a habit of walking through St Stephen’s Green on Sundays as if we were in a film nobody else could see. On Instagram, we were always laughing. In real life, by the end, we had become experts at smiling in public and going silent the minute the door closed behind us.
His name was Mark, and for the first three years, loving him felt easy. He knew how I took my coffee. I knew the exact crease that appeared between his eyebrows when he was worried. We met outside Whelan’s after a gig, both pretending we weren’t waiting for the same taxi. He had a scarf wrapped badly around his neck and asked if I thought the rain would ever get bored of Dublin. I laughed, and that was it. For a long time, I thought beginnings like that protected you from ordinary endings.
What people envied, I think, was our performance of certainty. We hosted dinners. We remembered birthdays. We had a shared group chat full of holiday plans and jokes about who would get married first. When friends broke up, they came to us separately, as if we were a small embassy for lasting love. “You two give me hope,” one of my friends said one night in Grogan’s, leaning across the table with wine on her breath. Mark squeezed my knee under the table. I smiled. Neither of us said that we had spent the taxi over arguing about money, about his distance, about how I could feel him leaving me in tiny ways but not say it without sounding dramatic.
The unraveling didn’t come with betrayal, not the obvious kind anyway. There was no discovered message, no lipstick on a collar, no grand scene on Grafton Street. It was smaller and somehow more humiliating. He stopped telling me things. I stopped asking properly. We became polite roommates with a history. He would come home late from work in the Docklands, exhausted and grey-faced, and I would be waiting with a question I had rehearsed all evening. By the time he took off his coat, I would lose my nerve and ask if he wanted pasta instead.
Then one Friday in February, we went to a friend’s engagement party in a pub near Camden Street. Everyone was delighted to see us. Someone shouted, “Here they are, the dream team!” and Mark put his arm around my shoulders so naturally that I nearly cried. We stood under warm lights, accepting congratulations that weren’t even ours, and I watched him charm the room. He was funny, attentive, bright. He told a story about our first holiday in Kerry and made everyone laugh. I laughed too, because the story was good, and because I still loved the version of him who told it.
Later, I found him outside, smoking though he had quit two years before. The street was wet and shining, taxis hissing past, people spilling out of nearby Dublin pubs with their coats open to the cold. He looked at me and said, very quietly, “I can’t keep doing this.”
I thought he meant the party. I thought he meant pretending for one more night. But then his face folded in a way I had not seen before. He said he felt like he was failing at being happy. He said he loved me, but he didn’t know how to be with me without feeling trapped by the person everyone expected him to be. I wanted to be angry. Part of me was. But mostly I felt a terrible relief, because someone had finally spoken the truth out loud.
We left without saying proper goodbyes. In the taxi home, neither of us touched our phones. The driver had the radio low, some late-night talk show murmuring about housing and weather, the usual Dublin soundtrack of worry. Mark stared out one window. I stared out the other. When we got back to the flat, we sat on the kitchen floor because the table felt too formal. We talked until the sky began to pale. Not beautifully. Not like in films. We repeated ourselves. We blamed each other. We apologised for things we would probably never fully understand. At one point he cried into his sleeve, and I remember thinking how young he looked, how tired we both were from holding up a life
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
