I started leaving notes around Dublin the winter after my mother died. It sounds sweeter than it was. At the time, it was mostly because I couldn’t bear the quiet of my own head. I was twenty-six, living in a small flat near Phibsborough, working in a café where I smiled at strangers all day and went home with my face aching from pretending. My mother had been the sort of woman who complimented bus drivers, remembered the names of shop assistants, and once made me carry a bunch of daffodils through the rain to give to a neighbour who had looked “a bit hollow” in the lift. When she was gone, the city seemed to have lost a layer of kindness. Or maybe I had.
The first note was written on the back of a receipt from George’s Street Arcade. I had been crying in the toilets there, silently and dramatically, as if I were in a film no one had agreed to watch. In my bag I found a pen and wrote, You are doing better than you think. I stuck it to the mirror with a bit of tape I used for café labels. I expected to feel foolish, but instead I felt my breathing slow. It was the first useful thing I had done in weeks.
After that, I carried a packet of yellow sticky notes everywhere. I left them on bus seats, inside library books, on the back of bathroom doors, near the Luas machines, under sugar bowls in cafés. Nothing grand. Just small sentences my mother might have said if she had caught someone looking tired. Drink water. Ring the person you miss. You are not behind. Stay. The word stay was one I wrote often, though I never admitted to anyone why.
One Thursday evening in February, I walked from work towards the Ha’penny Bridge with my pockets full of notes. The sky was low and bruised, and the Liffey had that pewter colour it gets when the city is deciding whether to rain. I stuck one note to the green railings near the bridge. It said, Someone will be glad you’re still here tomorrow. I had written it for no one and everyone, which is another way of saying I had written it for myself.
I crossed over and was halfway towards Temple Bar when I heard a voice behind me. A man was standing by the railing, holding the note carefully between both hands. He was maybe in his late fifties, in a navy coat that had seen better years, with a paper bag from a pharmacy tucked under one arm. He asked if I had written it. My first instinct was to deny it, because kindness is easy when it is anonymous and terrifying when someone looks directly at you. But I said yes.
He told me his name was Brendan. He had come into town from Clondalkin after visiting his brother in hospital. His brother had stopped speaking after a stroke, and Brendan had spent two hours beside the bed talking about the weather, old football matches, and what their mother used to cook on Sundays. He said he had left the hospital feeling useless. Then he saw my note. He wasn’t crying, but his voice had loosened at the edges. He said, “I think I’ll go back in the morning.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was used to my notes disappearing into the city like little paper boats. I had never imagined one landing in someone’s actual hands at the exact moment they needed it. We stood there with people moving around us, tourists taking photos, cyclists ringing bells, Dublin carrying on as if nothing important had happened. Brendan folded the note and put it in his wallet. Before he left, he asked if I was alright. It was such a simple question,
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
