I was twenty-eight, living in a flat near Rathmines, and pretending I was grand at a level that deserved an award. My mother had died the previous winter, my job in town had become a place I went to answer emails and avoid myself, and every Friday evening I walked home through Dublin with the same plastic bag of dinner for one, telling people I was busy if they asked.
That May bank holiday, I bought a ticket from Heuston to Galway without telling anyone. I told my brother I was working. I told my flatmate I was going to see an aunt in Kildare. The truth was that I had received a message from Elena, a woman I had loved in college and lost through ordinary cowardice. She wrote, “I’m in Galway for the weekend before I leave Ireland. If you ever wanted to say goodbye properly, now is your chance.”
We had not spoken in four years. In college we were the kind of almost-love that everyone could see except the two people inside it. We studied in the same corner of the library, shared chips outside late-night pubs, and once kissed in the rain after a party near Portobello. Then her father got sick, I took a job I hated because it sounded sensible, and we drifted with the stubbornness of people who are waiting for the other person to make the brave move.
On the train west, I watched the city thin into fields and felt foolish. By Athlone I nearly got off and turned back. By Athenry my hands were sweating. Galway was bright when I arrived, that odd Atlantic brightness that makes everything look recently forgiven. She was waiting near Eyre Square in a navy coat, her hair shorter than I remembered, one hand raised like we had only seen each other last week.
We hugged for too long and then laughed because neither of us knew where to put our grief. She took me to a small café first, then we walked down Shop Street, past buskers and tourists and people drinking pints outside as if summer had been officially declared. We ended up near the Spanish Arch with takeaway coffees gone cold in our hands. The Corrib moved fast beside us. Elena told me she was moving to Montreal. I told her my mother had died. She touched my sleeve, and that was the first time all year I nearly cried in front of someone.
That evening, we went to Tig Cóilí. There was music in the corner and the whole place seemed to breathe with it. We found two stools by the wall and talked over the fiddle and the low thunder of conversation. I told her things I had not told my closest friends: that after the funeral I kept ringing my mother’s phone just to hear her voicemail, that I sometimes
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