I met Clara on a Tuesday in June, under the clock at Connolly Station, because both of us were late for trains we ended up missing. She was trying to get to Howth with a paper bag of strawberries, and I was meant to be in Malahide helping my brother move a couch. The rain had come down suddenly, that warm Dublin rain that makes everyone look both annoyed and forgiving. She laughed when her bag split and the strawberries rolled across the platform like little red marbles. I helped her gather them, and by the time the next DART came, we had both decided we weren’t going where we were supposed to go.
We went to Howth anyway. We ate the strawberries on the pier, wiping rainwater off a bench with my sleeve, and watched the gulls behave like they owned the world. Clara had a way of talking that made ordinary things feel chosen. She told me she was only in Dublin for the summer, doing research in Trinity before moving to Berlin in September. I told her I had lived here all my life and still got lost around Dublin when my mind was busy. She said that was the best way to know a city, by letting it surprise you.
That summer became a map of small surprises. We walked through St Stephen’s Green after work and sat by the lake until the park keeper’s whistle sent everyone drifting towards the gates. We drank pints in Kehoe’s and pretended to understand the poetry night upstairs. We bought chips near Dame Street and ate them too hot, laughing with vinegar on our fingers. Some evenings we walked along the Grand Canal, where the water held the pink of the sky, and Clara would lean her head on my shoulder as if we had been together for years instead of weeks.
I tried not to count the days. She never hid the fact that she was leaving. In the beginning, that made it easy. We could be brave because there was an ending already written for us. No arguments about rent or families or whether we wanted the same life. Just June turning into July, July loosening into August, and the feeling that the city had pulled up a chair for the two of us.
The day I realised I loved her, we were at the Poolbeg Lighthouse. It was windy enough to steal the words out of your mouth. Clara had wrapped her scarf around her hair and was walking ahead of me on the red wall, arms out for balance. She turned back and shouted something I couldn’t hear, and for a second she looked completely held by the light, the sea on both sides, the city behind her. I remember thinking, not that I wanted to keep her, but that I wanted her to always be happy enough to look like that.
Near the end of August, she asked me to come with her to Berlin. We were sitting outside a café near George’s Street Arcade, coffees gone cold between us. She said it softly, almost like she was apologising. I had imagined the question so many times that I thought I would have an answer ready. Instead, I watched people pass with shopping bags and umbrellas and dogs tugging at leads, and I felt the whole of my life in Dublin pressing around me. My mother’s bad hip. My brother and his new baby. The job I had only just stopped hating. The streets I knew by the cracks in the pavement.
I said I couldn’t. Then, because I was young and frightened of sounding small, I added too many reasons. She listened, nodding, and I could see each reason landing where hope had been. She did not cry. That made it worse. She reached across the table and held my hand, and said, “Then let’s not ruin what we had by making it something it isn’t.”
On her last night, we went back to Howth. It felt right to return to the place where the summer had opened. We walked the pier in silence for a while. The sky was clear, and the lights across the bay trembled like they were unsure of themselves. She gave me a book she had carried all summer, full of folded corners and notes in the margins. Inside the front cover she had written, “For the boy who missed his train and found me instead.” I gave her nothing but a letter I had rewritten six times and still thought was poor.
At the airport the next morning, we promised the usual things people promise when they cannot bear the truth. Calls. Visits. Christmas, maybe. For a while, we managed it. Messages crossed between Dublin and Berlin, photographs of streets, jokes, songs we had heard in shops. Then life,
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
