I met him on the Luas on a wet Tuesday evening, the kind of Dublin rain that does not fall so much as hang in the air and wait for you to walk through it. I had just finished a twelve-hour shift in a pharmacy near St Stephen’s Green and was standing by the doors with my headphones in, pretending not to notice my own tired face reflected in the glass.
At Harcourt, a man got on carrying a broken umbrella and a paper bag from a bakery. He was soaked through, hair stuck to his forehead, laughing quietly to himself like the weather had told him a private joke. When the Luas lurched, the paper bag slipped from his hand and a croissant rolled across the floor to my shoe. He looked at it, then at me, and said, “That was going to be my dinner, so if you step on it, we’re legally married.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. I had been careful with laughter that year. My father had died the previous winter, my mother had moved in with my sister in Kildare, and I had become one of those people who went to work, came home, ate toast over the sink, and called it coping. But this stranger, with rain dripping from his coat onto the Luas floor, made something crack open in me.
His name was Cian. He was getting off at Smithfield. I was meant to go all the way to Heuston, but when he asked if I wanted half of the surviving pastry and a coffee, I heard myself say yes. We went to a small café near the square, both of us damp and shivering, and talked until the chairs were being stacked around us. He was a sound engineer, from Phibsborough, with a scar on his chin from falling off a wall in Galway when he was nineteen. He asked questions like he genuinely wanted the answers. Not the polite ones. The real ones.
After that, I started taking the Luas at the same time even on days I finished early. I told myself it was coincidence, then routine, then fate. Really, it was hunger. Not just for him, though that came quickly, but for the version of myself who appeared beside him. With Cian, I was funny again. I was spontaneous. I ate chips on the wall outside Temple Bar at midnight and didn’t worry about the next morning. I let him pull me into pubs where someone was always playing a fiddle badly and beautifully. I kissed him under the awning of the Olympia after a gig we could barely afford.
Within three months, he had become the first person I wanted to tell everything to. Within five, he had a toothbrush at my flat in Inchicore. Within six, I knew I was in trouble.
Cian loved like a match being struck. Bright, warm, impossible not to look at. But matches burn down. He would disappear into work for days and return with flowers from a petrol station and stories so charming I forgot I had been hurt. He hated plans. I lived by them. He said I made life feel safe. I said he made life feel alive. Neither of us noticed, at first, that we were asking the other person to fix something we had not named.
The addiction was not dramatic from the outside. I still went to work. I still paid rent. I still answered texts, mostly. But inside, my whole mood began to depend on him. If Cian sent a voice note, the day lifted. If he went quiet, I checked my phone until my stomach turned. I stopped meeting friends because I wanted to be available in case he called. I stopped visiting my father’s grave in Glasnevin because grief felt dull compared to the panic and sweetness of him.
The worst part was that he did love me. That made it harder to leave. Bad people are easy to walk away from in stories. Cian was not bad. He was generous and lost and terrified of being needed. I was loving and lonely and terrified of being left
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
