I met Niamh on a wet Thursday outside Whelan’s, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and make everyone look a little heartbroken. I was twenty-six, working in a café off Camden Street, convinced I was only passing through my own life until something bigger arrived. She was standing under the awning, smoking a cigarette she didn’t seem to want, laughing at something her friend had said. I remember thinking she had the rare kind of laugh that made strangers feel included.
We started talking because I had no umbrella and she had half of one. She walked with me as far as St Stephen’s Green, leaning into the wind, telling me she was a primary school teacher in Rathmines and that she loved Dublin most in bad weather because it made the city honest. By the time we reached the Luas stop, my jacket was soaked through and I had fallen, quietly and completely, in love.
For two years, we built a small life out of ordinary things. Sunday walks through Phoenix Park, cheap pasta in my flat in Portobello, pints in Kehoe’s when we had money, tea in bed when we didn’t. She kept a notebook full of things children in her class said, and she would read them to me in the evenings until I laughed so hard I forgot whatever trouble I had brought home. I had never known love could be so calm. I thought it would feel like fireworks, but with Niamh it felt like a light left on for me.
Then I got offered a job in London. It was the sort of opportunity I had been talking about for years, the sort everyone said I’d be mad to refuse. More money, better title, a proper start. Niamh didn’t ask me not to go. That almost made it worse. She just sat at my kitchen table, twisting a tea towel in her hands, and said, “I’m proud of you. I just don’t know where I fit in your bigger life.”
I told her we would make it work. I said all the confident things people say when they are afraid. Flights were cheap. It was only an hour away. We had phones. We had love. But love, I learned, can be wounded by distance even when nobody means to hurt it. At first, we called every night. Then every second night. Then one of us was tired, or busy, or silently resentful. When she visited me, I spent half the weekend checking emails. When I came back to Dublin, I treated home like a layover.
The end happened in Heuston Station. I had come over for her birthday and missed the dinner because a meeting ran late. She waited in a restaurant near George’s Street for forty minutes before ordering alone. The next morning, she walked me to the station. I kept apologising, but my apology had the same old shape, polished from overuse. She stopped near the platform and said, very gently, “I don’t want to keep missing someone who is still here.”
I was angry then, because anger is easier than shame. I told her she was giving up. She cried without making a sound. I got on the train to the airport, watched her grow smaller through the window, and convinced myself she would call. She didn’t. I didn’t either. Pride did what distance had started.
Years passed. London became normal. I moved jobs, changed flats, dated kind people I could not quite love properly. Every time I came home, Dublin seemed to keep Niamh for itself. I saw her in every woman with dark hair crossing Grafton Street, heard her laugh in crowded
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
