I met him on a Tuesday morning in the waiting area of the Intreo office on Parnell Street, which is not where anyone expects a love story to begin. I had a plastic folder on my knees with all the proof of my collapse inside it: redundancy letter, notice from the landlord, bank statements printed in black and white like an autopsy. My café job in Rathmines had gone first, then the room I was renting, then most of my pride. I was thirty-four and back sleeping on my sister’s couch in Ballymun, listening to her children breathe at night and telling myself I was only passing through.
He sat two chairs away from me, holding a cracked phone and wearing a good coat that looked like it belonged to a better year. I noticed his hands because they were shaking slightly. Not from drink or anything dramatic, just from the kind of exhaustion that has nowhere else to go. When his number was called, he stood up too quickly and dropped a brown envelope. Papers scattered under the chairs. I helped him gather them, and he laughed in a small, embarrassed way. “There goes the last of my empire,” he said.
His name was Ciarán. He had run a small printing business near Dublin city centre with his brother. After his marriage ended, the business followed, or maybe the other way around. He had lost the unit, then the apartment in Smithfield, then the version of himself that knew how to walk into a room without apologising. I told him I was sorry. He said, “Don’t be. I’m becoming very efficient at starting again.”
We saw each other twice more in that same waiting room over the next month. The third time, rain was hammering against the windows and the queue was hardly moving. He asked if I wanted tea after. I nearly said no because I had seven euro in my purse and a talent for refusing kindness before it could refuse me. But he said, “I know a place that won’t mind us sitting too long.” We went to a little café off Capel Street and shared a pot of tea. He paid with coins counted under the table. I pretended not to see, because dignity is sometimes letting someone give what they can.
There was no grand spark at first. It was more like someone lighting a match in a freezing room. We started walking together when neither of us had money for anything else. We walked along the Liffey, through Temple Bar before the crowds got loud, up past Christ Church, around the Iveagh Gardens when the gates were open. We learned each other in weather. He knew I went quiet when I was frightened. I knew he made jokes when he wanted to cry. Once, in Phoenix Park, he admitted he had spent a night in his van after being too ashamed to call a friend. I told him I had once stood outside a letting agency window and cried because all the places advertised cost more than I earned in a month. We were not trying to impress each other, and that became its own form of tenderness.
The day everything changed was not romantic either. I had an interview for a receptionist job near St Stephen’s Green. I borrowed my sister’s blouse and wore shoes that pinched. On the way in, I froze outside the building. Through the glass doors I could see clean floors, bright lights, people who looked like they had never lost a morning to panic. I rang Ciarán without thinking. He was on a bus somewhere near Drumcondra, but he got off and came straight to me. He didn’t give me a speech. He just stood beside me and said, “You’re not asking them to save you. You’re offering them someone who survived.”
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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
