I met Aoife outside Whelan’s on a wet Thursday in November, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as settle into your bones. She was sharing a cigarette with a stranger and laughing as if she had known him all her life. I remember thinking she looked like someone who belonged to everyone a little bit, and to no one completely.
We became friends first, which is a dangerous thing when you are twenty-four and lonely. We worked in cafés two doors apart near Grafton Street, and every morning she would appear at my counter before her shift, hair still damp, asking for an Americano and telling me some small disaster from the night before. A flatmate crying in the kitchen. A cousin needing money. A lad from Galway who had texted after two years saying he was “in a bad place.” Aoife always went. She always answered. She always chose whoever sounded most broken.
I mistook that for kindness. It was kindness, in a way, but it was also a hunger. She needed to be needed. I learned this slowly, over pints in Grogan’s, walks along the Grand Canal, and long evenings when she sat on my floor in Rathmines with her shoes off, telling me I was the only person who made her feel calm. Then her phone would light up, and calm would leave with her.
The first time I told her I loved her, we were on the DART back from Howth. It had been one of those rare clear Sundays when the sea looked silver and forgiving. We had eaten chips from the paper, and she had tucked her arm through mine because the wind was fierce. I said it softly, like I was admitting to a crime. She didn’t pull away. She rested her head on my shoulder and said, “You’re the safest person I know.”
At the time, I thought safe was close to loved. It isn’t.
A week later she went back to her ex, Mark, because he had stopped drinking for twelve days and needed someone to believe in him. I told her I understood. I did not understand. I walked home from Camden Street that night feeling stupid and noble, which is a particularly Irish form of heartbreak.
For nearly a year, I stayed in her orbit. She left Mark, then helped him move. She dated a musician from Phibsborough who borrowed money and never returned it. She spent Christmas Eve with a friend from college whose marriage was collapsing. Every time, when it ended or became too much, she came back to me. Not in a cruel way. That was the worst of it. She never promised what she didn’t mean. She never lied. She simply arrived at my door with red eyes and a bottle of cheap wine, and I opened it because I loved her.
The incident that changed everything happened outside The Bernard Shaw, after a birthday party I didn’t want to attend. Aoife had invited me, saying, “Please come, I’ll actually know someone decent there if you do.” I wore a shirt I’d ironed badly and spent half the night watching her comfort a man she’d met two hours earlier because he was upset about his band breaking up. She held his hand under the table. Not romantically, maybe, but intimately enough to make me feel like a spare coat on the back of a chair.
Near midnight, I went outside for air. Dublin was loud and shining with rain. A bus hissed past. People were smoking, shouting, kissing, living their little emergencies. Aoife came out looking for me, her face soft with concern.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
And something in me, finally, refused to perform.
I told her no. I told her I couldn’t keep being the place she returned to when everyone else had exhausted her. I said I loved her, but I was starting to dislike myself for waiting. My voice shook, which annoyed me, but I kept going. I told her she always chose someone else, not because they were better, but because they were falling apart louder.
She cried then. Not dramatically. Quietly, like a person hearing the truth in a language they already knew. She said, “I don’t know how to choose someone who doesn’t need saving.”
That sentence stayed with me longer than the heartbreak did.
I
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
