I met him outside Whelan’s on a wet Thursday night, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and get into your sleeves. I had gone there with two girls from work because one of them had been dumped and said she needed “noise with guitars.” By midnight they were both gone, one into a taxi and one into the arms of her ex, and I was standing under the red awning on Wexford Street pretending to look for a bus.
He asked me if I had a lighter. I didn’t smoke, and neither did he, as it turned out. He said he only asked because he couldn’t think of a better opening line. I laughed because it was honest and because his coat was too thin for the weather. His name was Cian. He had a chipped front tooth, kind eyes, and the exhausted softness of someone who had been carrying a private worry around for months.
We walked towards Camden Street and ended up in a late bar where the floor was sticky and everyone seemed younger than us. He told me he was from Clontarf but living in Rathmines with two lads he barely knew. I told him I was from Galway, five years in Dublin, still saying I might move home someday though I knew I wouldn’t. We talked about ordinary things first: rent, bad managers, the Luas, whether the sea at Sandymount ever looked like the sea or just a large grey mood.
Then, somehow, the talk got true. He told me his mother had died the previous spring and that everyone kept congratulating him for being “strong.” He said he hated that word now. I told him I had spent the last year in a relationship with a man who never shouted, never cheated, never did anything dramatic enough for me to leave cleanly, but who made me feel like a lamp left on in an empty room. We were both a little drunk, not wildly, just enough for the guards at the gates of ourselves to look the other way.
At two, we got chips from a place near Harcourt Street and ate them walking nowhere in particular. The city had gone shiny with rain. Taxis hissed past. Someone was singing badly near the Green. He offered me the last chip, and I remember thinking, with foolish certainty, that people reveal themselves in tiny gestures like that. I invited him back to my flat in Portobello, not because I was reckless, but because the night had made a small, lit room around us and I didn’t want to step out of it yet.
We slept together once. It was tender in the awkward way first times can be when two people are trying not to ask too much of each other. Afterwards, we lay awake, listening to the radiator knock and the rain tapping the window. He told me he used to call his mother every Sunday from the promenade in Clontarf because the signal was better there than in his old flat. I told him I sometimes walked the Grand Canal when I felt like disappearing without actually leaving.
In the morning, the room was too bright and the spell had thinned. He made tea while I searched for clean mugs. We were polite, almost formal, like two people who had met at a funeral and shared too much over sandwiches. He looked younger in daylight. I noticed a small scar near his eyebrow. He noticed the stack of unopened post on my kitchen table and didn’t mention it.
Before he left, he stood in the hallway with his shoes on and said, “I’d like to see you again.” I said, “Me too.” I meant it when I said it. That is the part I still think about. I meant it completely for the three seconds it took to say.
He texted me that afternoon. Just a simple message: “Got home. Thanks for last night. Hope your head survived.” I saw it while buying milk in Spar and felt a warmth rise in me, followed immediately by panic. Not fear of him. Fear of being known. Fear that if we met again, the beautiful, fragile honesty of the night would become obligation, then expectation, then disappointment. I had mistaken loneliness for readiness. I had opened a door and, in the morning, found I didn’t know how to keep it open.
I typed replies all day
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
