We got the keys on a wet Friday in November, the kind of Dublin rain that makes every streetlight look bruised. The house was in Drimnagh, a small redbrick terrace with a cracked path, a stubborn front door, and a box room the estate agent kept calling “ideal for an office” because nobody in good conscience could call it a bedroom. We stood in the empty sitting room with a bottle of prosecco from Tesco, drinking from takeaway coffee cups because we had packed the glasses somewhere sensible and immediately forgotten where.
I remember thinking we had made it. Not in the grand way people talk about making it, with promotions and holidays and kitchens from magazines, but in the small Irish way: we had survived bidding wars, payslips, mortgage letters, my mother’s warnings, his father’s quiet loans, and the terrible intimacy of showing each other our bank accounts. We had a house. Our house. He lifted me up in the hallway and spun me once, badly, bumping my knee off the radiator. We laughed until I cried a little, and when he asked if I was alright, I said, “I’m just happy.” I was, mostly.
We had been together six years by then. We met outside The Bernard Shaw when it was still in Portobello, both of us pretending we weren’t freezing while waiting for friends who were late. He was kind, funny, and patient in a way that made me feel safe rather than bored. For years, he was the person I wanted to tell everything to first: a mad thing on the Luas, a difficult email, a song I heard in a shop on Camden Street. But buying the house turned us into managers of a life before we had checked if we still wanted the same one.
The first month was all paint samples and takeaway chips eaten on the floor. We spent Saturdays in B&Q arguing gently over shades of white, then made up over pints in The Black Lion. We sanded doors. We bought a second-hand couch from a woman in Terenure and carried it in sideways, swearing and laughing, while our neighbour watched from behind her net curtains. At night, we lay on a mattress in the front room because the bedroom smelled of damp, and we made plans with the confidence of people who hadn’t yet had to pay for a new boiler.
Then the small cracks opened. He wanted to knock the wall between the kitchen and dining room. I wanted to keep the old tiles because they reminded me of my granny’s house in Cabra. He wanted a dog. I wanted to go back to college part-time. He talked about children as if they were a natural next item on the list, after curtains and a dishwasher. I started waking at 4 a.m., listening to the traffic on the Long Mile Road, feeling like the house was breathing around me, asking a question I had avoided for years.
The night it ended, we had been painting the box room a soft green. We were tired, both of us speckled with colour, both hungry but too stubborn to stop. He said, not angrily, “I don’t know why everything feels so hard with you lately.” I sat down on the plastic sheet and looked at him. There was a line of paint across his cheek, and I loved him so much in that moment that it frightened me, because love had not been enough to make me stay inside the future he was building.
I told him I didn’t think I wanted the same life anymore. He didn’t shout. That almost made it worse. He put the roller down very carefully, like noise itself might break him, and asked how long I had known. I said I wasn’t sure. It was a coward’s answer, but it was true. Sometimes you don’t know you are leaving until your mouth says the words.
For two weeks, we lived together in the house like ghosts doing practical tasks. We emailed the solicitor. We rang the bank. We divided furniture we had only just bought. Friends offered spare rooms. My sister came over with soup and said nothing cruel, which was generous because she had warned me not to buy a house with someone unless I was certain. Certainty, I learned, is often just fear dressed nicely.
In the end, he stayed and I left. He could afford it with a lodger; I couldn’t. On
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
