I met Ciarán on a wet Tuesday outside the IFI, both of us pretending we were not too early for the same French film. He had forgotten his umbrella and I had one with a broken rib, so we stood under it badly, shoulder to shoulder, laughing at how Dublin rain always seemed to fall sideways. I was twenty-three, working in a café near Temple Bar, and he was studying architecture. He told me he liked buildings because they kept people’s secrets. I thought that was the most romantic thing I had ever heard.
We were together for four years. Our love lived in small places: chips on the wall by the Liffey, pints in Grogan’s, Sunday walks through Phoenix Park, and the top deck of the 46A where he would trace plans for impossible houses on the fogged-up window. He wanted to leave Ireland for a while. Berlin first, then maybe Copenhagen. I wanted a life that began and ended in Dublin, with my mother close enough for tea and my sister close enough to annoy me. Neither of us was wrong, but we were young enough to think love should solve geography.
The actual breakup was not dramatic. That almost made it worse. There was no betrayal, no shouting in the street, no smashed plates. He got an offer from a firm abroad, and I got a promotion managing the café. We sat on a bench near St Stephen’s Green with coffee going cold between us, saying kind things that cut like knives. He cried first. I remember being grateful for that because I was afraid I had loved him more. He promised he would come back for Christmas. I promised I would visit in spring. We kissed goodbye outside the Luas stop like people in films, except my nose was running and his suitcase wheel got stuck in a crack in the path.
For the first year, we kept the thread alive. Long emails. Bad video calls. Photos of meals, streets, train stations. Then the messages became shorter, more careful. He met someone. I said I was happy for him and meant it for about ten minutes at a time. I met someone too, a gentle man called Mark who loved me steadily, and for a while I believed steadiness was the same as peace. But Ciarán remained like an old song playing faintly in another room. Not loud enough to ruin my life, but never fully silent.
Ten years passed that way. He came home for funerals and weddings, but our timings never matched. Or maybe we made sure they did not. I saw his name online now and then, attached to buildings with clean lines and bright windows. I wondered if any of them held our secrets. I got engaged and unengaged. My father died. I changed jobs. I moved from Rathmines to Drumcondra. Life did what life does in Dublin: it kept circling the same streets until you became a different person on them.
Last November, I saw him in the National Gallery café. I knew it was him before he turned around. His shoulders were broader, his hair was threaded with grey, but he still tilted his head when reading a menu, as if the soup might reveal a hidden meaning. I could have walked out. Instead I said his name.
He looked at me for one full second before smiling, and in that second I understood how much I had built around the idea of him. The real man stood up, older and tired, with a small scar near his eyebrow I had never seen before. We hugged, not like lovers, not like strangers, but like two people returning borrowed things.
We walked afterwards along Merrion Square, because neither of us was ready to say goodbye again in a café full of clattering cups. He told me his relationship had ended two years before. I told him about Mark, about my father, about how I had finally learned to go to the cinema alone. We did not pretend the years had been simple. He said he had wanted to call when his mother was sick but felt he had lost the right. I said I had kept his old emails in a folder called “Receipts,” which made him laugh so hard he had to stop walking.
At the canal near Baggot Street, he asked the question I had feared and wanted for a decade. “Do you ever think we made a mistake?”
I watched a cyclist pass, scarf flying behind them like a flag. The honest answer was yes. The truer answer was no. We had loved each other, but we had also wanted different
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
