I met him because of the rain, which is a very Dublin thing to say, but it is true. I was standing outside Pearse Station with a broken umbrella, trying to decide whether to run for the bus or accept that I was already soaked through. It was one of those evenings when the sky seemed personally offended by everyone below it. My shoes were making a small lake around my feet, and I had a bag of books under my coat like a hen sheltering chicks.
He came out of the station holding two coffees and no umbrella at all. One coffee in each hand, hood up, glasses speckled with rain. He looked at my umbrella, which had turned inside out and was pointing towards the sky like a surrender flag, and said, “I think it’s seen enough.”
I should have laughed and walked away. I was tired, and I had promised myself that year I would stop making room for strangers. My last relationship had ended in a slow, humiliating way, not with one great betrayal but with months of being made to feel like I was asking too much by asking to be loved properly. I had become careful. Careful with my time, careful with my heart, careful even with my kindness.
But he offered me one of the coffees. “It was meant for my brother,” he said, “but he’s just texted to say he’s in Rathmines and apparently that is my problem.”
I told him I didn’t take coffee from strange men outside stations. He said that was fair and placed it on the windowsill beside me, as if making it available to the general weather. Then he stood there in the rain, drinking his own, not trying to impress me, not asking where I was going. After a minute, I picked up the coffee. It was too sweet, which I told him. He smiled and said, “That’s because my brother has the taste of a child who pays rent.”
His name was Cian. He was a primary school teacher in Drumcondra, and he had paint under one fingernail from helping his class make a cardboard solar system. I remember that detail because it made him seem immediately human to me. Not polished. Not performing. Just a man who had spent his day convincing children that Saturn’s rings were not, in fact, made of onion rings.
My bus came, the 15, glowing through the rain. I lifted my bag, said it was nice to meet him, and he nodded like he understood the rules of brief encounters. Then the bus pulled in, and for reasons I still cannot fully explain, I didn’t get on. I stood there while the doors opened and closed, while the driver looked at me with deep Dublin judgement, and while the bus moved off without me.
Cian looked at me and said, “That was either romantic or very poor planning.”
“Poor planning,” I said, though my face was warm.
We walked because there was no point pretending we were dry anymore. We went down towards Merrion Square, under the black trees and shining streetlights, sharing my broken umbrella even though it covered neither of us. He told me about his mother, who kept buying him tea towels because she thought single men lived in a state of fabric emergency. I told him about working in a bookshop and how customers always believed we had secret access to titles they could only describe as “blue, maybe, with a sad woman on it.”
There was no grand confession. No
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
