I met Clara on a Tuesday evening when the rain had made mirrors of the footpaths around Dublin. I was standing outside a small café near Grand Canal Dock, pretending to read messages on my phone while really watching the water shake under the wind. She came out carrying two coffees by mistake. The barista had made her order twice, and she asked me, with the confidence of someone who had nothing to lose, if I wanted the spare one.
That was how it began: not with music, not with a look across a crowded room, but with a paper cup warming my hands. She was from Galway, in Dublin for a six-month design contract. I was working in an office off Baggot Street and living in a flat in Rathmines with two men who labelled their milk as if it were gold. Clara laughed at that when I told her. She laughed easily, but never carelessly. Even her laughter seemed to notice things.
We started meeting after work. Sometimes we walked along the canal until the light went soft and the swans looked like folded paper. Sometimes we sat in Temple Bar pretending we were too sensible to pay tourist prices, then did it anyway. Once, after a gig in Whelan’s, we stood outside on Wexford Street sharing chips from a paper bag, and she told me she hated goodbyes so much she often left parties without telling anyone. “I prefer people to think I’m still somewhere nearby,” she said.
For months, she was somewhere nearby. That was the dangerous part. Love did not announce itself. It moved in quietly. It learned my coffee order. It left a scarf on the back of my chair. It texted me pictures of strange clouds. She would come over on Sundays and sit on my windowsill reading, one foot tucked under her, while I made pasta badly. I remember thinking, more than once, that happiness was not a dramatic thing. Sometimes it was just another person knowing where you kept the salt.
But Clara’s contract had an end date. We both knew it. She had been offered a permanent role in Amsterdam, the kind of opportunity people say you would be mad to refuse. I tried to be generous about it. I said the right things. I said she had to go. I said we would visit. I said distance was manageable now, with cheap flights and video calls and all the modern ways of pretending touch is not important.
She knew I was lying, because I knew she was lying too. Neither of us wanted a love that lived in airport security queues. Neither of us wanted to become two tired faces glowing on screens, describing our days instead of sharing them. Still, we avoided the real conversation until the final week, when everything became painfully ordinary. She returned my jumper. I gave her back a book. We had one last drink near St Stephen’s Green and spoke mostly about the weather.
The day she left, I offered to bring her to Heuston Station for the airport bus. She said I didn’t have to. I said I wanted to. On the Luas, her suitcase pressed against my knee every time the tram turned, as if even her luggage was trying to make contact. She looked out the window and I looked at her reflection. There are moments when a face becomes a place you are already missing.
At Heuston, the station was full of people in motion: students with backpacks, families counting bags, men in suits checking watches, a child crying because his balloon had escaped to the ceiling. Clara stood with her ticket in one hand and her passport in the other. We had rehearsed a calm goodbye, I think. A hug, a brave smile, a joke about Dutch bicycles. Something clean and adult.
Instead, when the announcement came, her face changed. Not dramatically. Just enough for me to see the fear underneath her courage. She stepped towards me and said, “I don’t want to disappear from your life like I do from parties.”
I told her she wouldn’t. I wanted to say more. I wanted to say don’t go, or let me come, or choose me, or I’ll choose you. But love, at that moment, felt too big for sentences. So I kissed her.
It was the most passionate kiss of my life because it had no future to lean on. It was all present tense. Her hands were at my collar, then my face. Mine were around her waist, pulling her
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
