I used to think losing everything would make a great noise, like glass breaking or a door slamming. For me, it happened quietly. One Tuesday morning in Dublin, I put my key into the door of the flat I had lived in for nine years near Phibsborough, and it no longer worked. The landlord had changed the locks after months of arrears, letters, and shame. My marriage had ended the year before, my little café job had disappeared, and by lunchtime I was sitting on a bench outside the Garden of Remembrance with two bags, pretending I was waiting for someone.
I met Maeve three weeks later at the Capuchin Day Centre. She was ahead of me in the queue, wearing a green coat with a missing button and holding a book so tightly it looked like it was keeping her upright. When one of the volunteers asked how she was, she smiled and said, “Still here, which is irritatingly impressive.” I laughed before I could stop myself. She turned around, and that was the first time she looked at me. Not kindly, not romantically, just directly, as if she could see I had been trying to disappear.
We started talking because of the book. It was a battered copy of Dubliners, though she said she was sick of men in old stories walking around feeling important and miserable. I told her I was doing a fine job of the miserable part myself. She told me her husband had died suddenly two years before, and after that, everything came apart in a slow, stupid way. A missed payment. Then another. The house in Crumlin sold. Her sisters doing their best but having no space. A few months sleeping on couches, then in hostels, then nowhere in particular. She said grief was like damp in the walls; even when you painted over it, it came through.
I had no grand answer to that. I only nodded. That became our first language, really. Nodding. Sitting beside each other in silence. Sharing a packet of biscuits in Smithfield. Walking through Phoenix Park because walking was free and it made us feel less trapped. We never called them dates. People like us didn’t use words like dates. We said, “Will you be around tomorrow?” and “Mind yourself tonight,” and “I saved you the good tea bag.”
The night everything changed was in December, during one of those cold Dublin evenings when the rain feels personal. I had been offered a room in temporary accommodation, and Maeve had not. I remember standing outside Pearse Street Library with the letter in my hand, feeling relief and guilt twisting together. She congratulated me, but her voice had gone small. I knew that voice. It was the sound of being left behind.
I asked her to come with me to the office the next morning. Not because I could fix it, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of her lining up alone again. We got there before opening and sat on the steps with coffees from a Centra, our hands wrapped around the cups for warmth. She told me she was frightened she was becoming someone nobody would miss. I told her I had been frightened of the same thing for months. Then, without planning it, I said, “I’d miss you.” She looked at me for a long time, and then she cried in a way that had no performance in it. Just exhaustion leaving the body.
That day, a housing worker named Pauline made calls until her voice was hoarse. By evening, Maeve had a bed in a women’s hostel in Rathmines. It wasn’t a miracle. It wasn’t even comfortable. But it was a door that closed, a pillow, a place to charge her phone. We celebrated with chips on
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