I found the letter on a wet Tuesday in November, the kind of Dublin afternoon when the buses sigh at the kerb and everyone looks personally betrayed by the sky. I had gone into a second-hand bookshop near Parnell Street to kill twenty minutes before meeting my sister at The Winding Stair. I wasn’t looking for anything romantic. I was newly single, badly pretending to be practical, and I had convinced myself that buying an old paperback was healthier than texting a man who had already made his absence very clear.
The book was a battered copy of Dubliners, with a cracked spine and someone’s old coffee ring on the cover. I bought it for three euro because I liked the idea of carrying James Joyce around like a small shield. Later, upstairs on the 46A, I opened it somewhere near “A Painful Case” and a folded sheet of blue writing paper slipped out onto my lap. At first I thought it was a receipt, but then I saw the handwriting. Careful, slanted, fountain-pen blue. The first line read, “My dearest Niamh, I am writing this because I am a coward when you are in front of me.”
I should have put it back. That would have been decent. Instead, I read it while rain ran down the bus windows and the city blurred into amber lights. The letter was dated 1987. It was from a man called Seán to a woman called Niamh, and it said the sort of things people are almost too embarrassed to say now. He wrote about seeing her outside Bewley’s, about the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she disagreed with him, about how he had let pride ruin a good thing. He asked her to meet him the following Saturday at the Ha’penny Bridge at noon. “If you do not come,” he wrote, “I will understand. If you do, I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve it.”
By the time I reached Rathmines, I was crying so quietly that an older woman across from me handed me a tissue without a word. I don’t know why it hit me so hard. Maybe because I had spent months accepting crumbs from someone who never once risked embarrassment for me. Maybe because this stranger, decades earlier, had put his whole heart into a book and trusted the world not to laugh at it. I got off two stops late and stood under the shelter reading the letter again, feeling as if Dublin itself had passed me a note.
That night I couldn’t stop thinking about whether Niamh had gone. I looked at the inside cover and found a faint pencil mark: N. Byrne, Drumcondra. It was ridiculous, but the next day after work I searched online, checked old electoral notices, and found a Niamh Byrne listed in connection with a small community choir near Griffith Avenue. I emailed the address with the subject line “An old book and a letter,” fully expecting no reply. Three days later, I got one from her daughter, Aoife. Her mother was still alive, living in Clontarf, and yes, she had once known a Seán who wrote letters and quoted Joyce badly.
We met on a Sunday in a café near St Stephen’s Green. Niamh arrived in a navy coat, silver hair pinned neatly, lipstick perfect. She held the letter with both hands before she even read it, as if the paper itself had a pulse. When she finished, she laughed, then cried, then laughed again. “The eejit,” she said softly. She told me she had never received it. Seán had placed it in her borrowed copy of Dubliners, but she had returned the book to a friend without opening it. She did go to the Ha’penny Bridge that Saturday, but at half twelve, after losing her nerve and circling the block for ages. He had gone by then. They met other people, married other people, lived full lives, but she said there had always been a tiny locked room in her heart with his name on the door.
I asked if Seán was still around. She looked down at the letter and nodded. Widowed, living in Phibsborough, according to a Christmas card chain that had somehow survived forty years of silence. Aoife found his number through a cousin of a cousin, because Dublin is not a city so much as a web of people pretending not
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
