I grew up in a village so small that if you bought cough sweets in the shop, three people would ask your mother if you were coming down with something before you got home. Nothing moved quietly there. A new car, a new haircut, a stranger at Mass, all of it became news before dinner. So when I fell in love with Siobhán, the postmistress’s daughter, we understood from the start that our love would have to become invisible.
We were both twenty-six. I was home from Dublin after losing a job in a café near Heuston, and she had come back from Galway to mind her father after his heart operation. We met properly in the back room of the community hall, folding raffle tickets for a fundraiser neither of us cared about. I had known her all my life in the way you know people in villages, as a name, a family, a face passing the altar. That evening, she made a joke about the priest’s microphone sounding like a haunted kettle, and I laughed so hard I dropped an entire book of tickets into a bucket of floor cleaner.
After that, we found reasons to be in the same places. She would walk her father’s old terrier at the same time I went running. I would volunteer for things I had avoided since childhood. We first kissed behind the handball alley on a wet Thursday in November, both of us shaking, not from cold but from the knowledge that a single pair of eyes could change everything.
At first the secrecy felt almost romantic. We left notes inside library books. We drove separately to the coast and met in car parks with our hoods up. We sat in her car outside closed churches and talked until the windows steamed. In Dublin, people imagine privacy as loneliness, but in a village privacy is a luxury item. We learned the geography of hiding: the bend in the lane where no house looked out, the abandoned shed near the old quarry, the last table in the back of a hotel bar two towns over.
The trouble was that love does not like being treated like evidence. It wants to sit beside you at weddings. It wants to hold your hand in the chipper queue. It wants to answer when someone asks, “Are you seeing anyone?” For two years, we answered no. We watched each other dance with men at Christmas parties. We stood apart at funerals. Once, when Siobhán’s aunt said I’d make “some fella a lovely wife,” Siobhán smiled so politely I thought it might break her face.
What made it worse was that my father was adored in the village. He trained the under-12s, cut turf for widows, fixed gates without taking money. I loved him, but I feared his disappointment more than anyone’s gossip. He had never said anything cruel about people like us, but he
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
