When Conor and I moved into the little apartment in Rathmines, I thought love would become easier because the distance had been solved. Before that, we were always crossing the city for each other, him coming from Drumcondra with a backpack and me waiting outside the Swan Centre with two coffees going cold in my hands. We spoke then as if living together would be the beginning of our real life. We imagined dinners, Sunday walks, shared towels, arguments about nothing, and falling asleep to the same rain hitting the same window.
The apartment was on the top floor above a hair salon, with a slanted ceiling in the bedroom and a kitchen so narrow that if one of us opened the fridge, the other had to step into the hall. I loved it immediately. Conor said it was small but “ours,” and for the first few weeks that word carried us. We bought a cheap blue couch from a man in Phibsborough, dragged it up three flights of stairs, and laughed so much on the landing that one of the neighbours opened her door to check if we were all right.
Then real life arrived, not loudly, but in shifts and habits. I worked early mornings in a café near St Stephen’s Green, leaving the apartment before the sun had properly found the windows. Conor worked evenings in a bar off Camden Street and came home smelling of stout, lemons, and other people’s conversations. I would be asleep when he returned. He would be asleep when I left. We started communicating through objects: a mug washed and left upside down, a slice of toast wrapped in kitchen paper, a note on the fridge saying, “Rent due Friday,” or “Your mother rang.”
It is strange how two people can share a bed and still miss each other completely. His side would be warm when I got in, but he would already be gone. My hairpins appeared on his bedside locker. His guitar picks turned up in my coat pockets. We were everywhere in each other’s space, and almost nowhere in each other’s days.
At first I blamed work, then tiredness, then Dublin itself, with its buses that never arrived when you needed them and rents that made you feel guilty for wanting a room to breathe. But the truth was quieter than that. We had become careful around each other. Not cruel, not dramatic, just careful. I stopped asking him why he stayed out after closing because I didn’t want to hear an answer that sounded like freedom. He stopped asking why I sat in the kitchen after work with my shoes still on because I didn’t want to admit I was waiting for a version of us that had already left.
The night it changed was in November, during one of those wet Dublin evenings when the whole city looks varnished. I came home early because the café’s boiler had broken. I expected an empty flat, the usual hum of the fridge, the damp smell from the window frame. Instead, Conor was there, sitting on the floor with two mugs of tea between his knees. The lights were off except for the lamp near the couch. Rain was ticking against the skylight.
“I didn’t go in,” he said.
I took off my coat slowly. “Are you sick?”
He shook his head. “I wanted to see you awake.”
That nearly broke me, because it was such a small sentence and it held months inside it. I sat opposite him on the floor. For a while, we drank tea like two people at a wake. Then he said, “Do you think we’re happy?”
I wanted to be generous. I wanted to say we were just busy, just tired, just young and broke in a city that charges you for hope. But I looked around our apartment: the blue couch, the peeling paint, the two laundry baskets because we had stopped mixing our clothes. I thought about all the nights I had walked home through Portobello, passing lit windows and imagining other people being loved properly inside them.
“I think we love each other,” I said. “But I don’t think we know how to live together.”
He nodded as if I had said something he had been carrying too. There
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