I met Aoife in the queue for coffee on South William Street, both of us pretending not to be freezing. It was one of those grey Dublin mornings where everyone looks personally betrayed by the sky. She was ahead of me, searching her coat pockets for coins, and when she came up short I paid the difference without thinking. It was only sixty cents, but she turned around as if I had done something heroic.
“That’s very generous for a man who looks like he hates mornings,” she said.
She was right. I did hate mornings then. I hated most things quietly. I was twenty-nine, working in an office near the quays, living in a small room in Phibsborough, and carrying around a kind of tiredness I thought was maturity. I had a habit of keeping my life narrow. Same pub, same friends, same walk home, same excuses for not trying anything new. I thought being careful meant being safe.
Aoife was the opposite of careful. Not reckless, exactly, but open. She noticed buskers. She knew the names of trees. She would stop halfway across the Ha’penny Bridge just to watch the Liffey moving under us, even if people tutted behind. On our third date, she brought me to the National Gallery and made me sit in front of a painting for ten full minutes without checking my phone. I remember feeling ridiculous at first, then strangely moved. I had forgotten that looking could be an activity by itself.
We were together for just under a year. Not long, in the grand measurement of love, but long enough to rearrange the furniture inside me. We went to Whelan’s on nights when neither of us knew the band. We ate chips outside Leo Burdock’s after pints and argued about whether the gulls were brave or evil. We walked the long path to Poolbeg Lighthouse one windy Sunday in February, our faces raw and laughing, and she told me she was applying for a research job in Copenhagen.
I said all the correct things. That it sounded brilliant. That she should go for it. That I was proud of her. But inside, something small and selfish closed its fist. I had become used to her presence in my week. Tuesday dinners in Stoneybatter. Saturday mornings in the market at George’s Street Arcade. Her toothbrush in a chipped mug beside mine. I didn’t want to be the sort of man who asked someone to shrink their life for him, so instead I became the sort of man who withdrew before he could be left.
For the next few weeks, I was a coward in subtle ways. I replied slower. I made jokes when she wanted reassurance. I said “we’ll figure it out” in the tone of a man already packing up the room. Aoife noticed, of course. People like her always notice. One evening, after dinner in a little Italian place near Camden Street, she asked me to walk with her along the Grand Canal. The water was dark and still, catching the yellow of the streetlights.
“I don’t need you to promise forever,” she said. “I just need you to be honest about whether you’re here now.”
I remember the shame of that sentence more clearly than anything. Because I loved her, but I was not fully there. I was already grieving the ending so hard that I had stopped living the middle. I told her I didn’t know if I could do distance. She nodded, not dramatically, not angrily. That almost made it worse. She had the calm of someone who had offered the truth a chair and was waiting for it to sit down.
We broke up two weeks before she left. It was not a cruel ending. There were no slammed doors, no unforgivable words. I helped her carry two suitcases down the stairs of her flat in Rathmines, and we stood on the footpath beside the taxi, both of us pretending the driver couldn’t hear our silence. She hugged me for a long time, then kissed my cheek.
“Don’t go back to sleep,” she said.
At the time, I thought she meant about us. Later, I understood she meant about me.
For months after, Dublin seemed full of little traps. A song outside Grafton Street. The smell of cinnamon from a café she liked. The bench in Merrion Square where she once took a photo of me because she said I looked “accidentally content.” I missed her, but I also began to notice what she had left behind that wasn’t pain. I started saying yes more.
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
