I met Ciarán on a Tuesday night in Whelan’s, which is probably the most Dublin way to begin a story I spent years pretending was unusual. My friend had dragged me there after work because she fancied the drummer in a support band. I was standing near the stairs with a warm pint in my hand, trying to look like I belonged, when Ciarán leaned over and asked if I knew whether the last Luas had gone. He had dark curls damp from the rain and a navy jumper with a hole at the cuff. I told him the Luas didn’t go where he needed it to go anyway, and he laughed as if I had said something brilliant.
We ended up walking from Camden Street toward the river because neither of us wanted the night to end. Dublin was shiny with rain. The chipper lights were glowing. Outside Grogan’s, people were smoking like they had nowhere else to be. He told me he was studying architecture, that he loved old Georgian doorways, that he thought the Poolbeg chimneys looked like two cigarettes left burning in an ashtray. I told him things I didn’t usually tell strangers, like how I kept a notebook of overheard conversations and how I was afraid of becoming the sort of adult who only ever talked about rent.
At Ha’penny Bridge, he kissed me. It was not dramatic. No music swelled. A man cycled past and shouted something about getting a room. But I remember the cold railing against my back, the smell of rain and beer, and his hand resting gently at my elbow, as if asking permission even after I had already said yes. He gave me his number before he got a taxi on Aston Quay. The name he typed into my phone was Ciarán, with the fada, and underneath it he wrote, “the lad from the wet Tuesday.”
We texted for eleven days. I counted them later, which is mortifying but true. He sent me photos of buildings he liked. I sent him a picture of a dog wearing a raincoat outside St Stephen’s Green. We planned to meet on the Saturday, but he cancelled because his mother was sick. Then he went quiet. A day became three, then a week. I drafted messages and deleted them. Eventually I sent one that said, “Hope everything is okay.” It stayed on delivered. After a month, I told myself he had ghosted me. After six months, I told myself I was over it. After three years, I still looked for him in crowds.
That is the part I am embarrassed by. We had one night and eleven days. We never had a Christmas, a fight, a key to each other’s flat. He never met my friends properly. Still, he became a small ache I carried around the city. Whenever I crossed the Ha’penny Bridge, I remembered the kiss. Whenever I passed Whelan’s, I wondered if he had gone back there with someone else. It wasn’t that I believed he was my great love. It was worse than that. He was unfinished, and unfinished things have a way of staying alive.
Last November, I saw him again. I was in the queue at The Bakery in Grand Canal Dock, late for work and annoyed at myself for wanting a coffee badly enough to stand in the rain. A man in front of me turned slightly, and there he was. Older, of course. Shorter hair, a bit of grey near the temples, the same careful way of holding himself. My stomach dropped as if I had missed a step on the stairs.</
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