I used to think fiction was a safe place to hide. You could change a name, move a street, give someone a different coat, and nobody would know which part was true and which part was only a shape you had invented to carry a feeling. Then one wet Thursday in Dublin, I learned that a made-up story can still knock on a real person’s door.
I was twenty-nine then, working in a phone shop on Henry Street and writing short pieces in the evenings, mostly about love because I understood it badly and missed it often. I had been single for nearly a year after a quiet breakup that felt more like a room losing heat than a door slamming. To make myself feel brave, I signed up for a small open reading night above a pub near Temple Bar. I read a story I’d written about a woman who left a blue scarf on the 46A bus and a man who kept it for months, hoping to return it, not because he wanted the scarf but because he wanted one more chance to speak to the life he’d almost touched.
It was entirely fictional, or so I believed. I had picked the 46A because it sounded familiar to half of Dublin. I made the scarf blue because red felt too dramatic. I gave the woman a habit of reading the last page of books first because I liked that detail, though I didn’t know anyone who did it. In the story, the man found her again outside Trinity College Dublin, where she told him she had left the scarf on purpose, hoping the city might carry one small part of her away.
When I finished reading, people clapped in that gentle Dublin way that means either they liked it or they were being kind. I was folding my pages into my jacket pocket when a woman came up to me. She had rain on her fringe, a black wool coat, and an expression I couldn’t read.
“Where did you hear that?” she asked.
I thought she was joking. “In my own head, unfortunately.”
She didn’t smile. “No, seriously. Who told you about the scarf?”
Her name was Niamh. Two years before, she had left a blue scarf on the 46A after an argument with a man she had loved and been afraid to love properly. She used to read the last page of novels first because endings made her anxious. He had found her outside Trinity three weeks later, scarf in hand, but by then both of them were too proud to say the small sentence that would have saved them. They went for coffee, spoke politely, and never saw each other again.
I remember feeling my face burn. I kept saying, “I promise I didn’t know,” as if innocence could be proven by repetition. She looked at me for a long moment, then laughed, but it wasn’t an amused laugh. It was the laugh of someone seeing the universe behave without manners.
“Dublin is too small,” she said.
After that, we went downstairs because neither of us wanted to stand under the literary fairy lights any longer. The rain had stopped, and the street had that glossy look Dublin gets at night, every taxi and pub window doubled in the pavement. We walked without planning to. Past Dame Street, past the buskers, toward the river. At the Ha’penny Bridge, she told me his name was Ciarán and that she had once believed love should arrive with certainty, like a contract signed by both souls. I told her I thought love was more like trying
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
