We were meant to spend that weekend choosing table flowers. Instead, we spent it deciding whether we should get married at all. It sounds dramatic when I put it like that, but at the time it felt very quiet. No shouting, no betrayal, no big cinematic reason. Just two people sitting in a kitchen in Stoneybatter on a Friday evening, with a folder of invoices between us and a silence that had been growing for months.
Mark and I had been together seven years. We met outside Whelan’s after a gig neither of us had tickets for, because both of us had been dragged there by friends and both of us had lost them by midnight. Our first date was a walk through Dublin that turned into chips on the wall near Christchurch. For years, we were good at being light. We were good at laughing in Spar, at making a dinner out of toast and whatever was left in the fridge, at knowing when the other person needed tea and when they needed to be left alone.
But the year before the wedding had made us practical in a way that nearly killed the tenderness. His mother got sick and died within six months. My job became uncertain. Our rent went up. Every conversation became about money, family, guest lists, deposits, who would be offended, who had to sit beside whom. We were kind to each other, mostly, but we had stopped being gentle. There is a difference.
That Friday, Mark said, “Do you still want to do this?” He meant the wedding, but I knew he also meant us. I looked at him and felt the terrible relief of the question being asked out loud. I said, “I don’t know.” Then he nodded, like I had handed him something he had been carrying alone.
We agreed not to tell anyone for one weekend. No parents, no friends, no dramatic messages. We would spend Saturday together in the city, not as a couple planning a wedding, but as two people seeing what was still there. If that sounds foolish, maybe it was. But cancelling a wedding felt enormous, and ending us felt even bigger. We needed one last ordinary day before making either decision.
On Saturday morning, we took the Luas into town and walked without much of a plan. We got coffee near Capel Street and sat outside even though it was cold. Mark kept wrapping both hands around his cup. I remember noticing the grey in his beard and thinking he looked older than he had the previous summer. Grief had made him quieter, and I had mistaken quiet for distance.
We walked to the National Gallery, because it was free and dry. In one of the rooms, he stopped in front of a painting of a woman reading by a window. I was about to make some silly comment, the kind I used to make, but he said, “Mam would have liked this.” It was the first time in weeks he had mentioned her without immediately changing the subject. I said, “Tell me what she would have said.”
So he did. He told me she would have complained the frame was too fussy, then cried anyway. He told me he missed ringing her after work. He told me he hated that our wedding felt like an event she was absent from, instead of a day she should have been bossing everyone around. I listened, properly listened, not with half my mind on seating charts or emails. At some point he started crying, very quietly, and I put my hand on his sleeve. He didn’t pull away.
After that, the day softened. We had soup in a crowded café, walked down Graft
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