By the time I realised love had left us, we were still paying the electricity bill together. That’s the thing nobody tells you. Love can go quietly, without slamming a door, and still leave its shoes in the hallway. We had a flat in Phibsborough, a second-hand table from a man in Rathmines, and a shared Tesco Clubcard. On paper, we looked steady. In photographs, we looked kind. But inside the flat, we had become two polite strangers taking turns to boil the kettle.
I met Conor when I was twenty-six, outside Whelan’s on a wet Thursday night. I had lost my friends, my phone was dead, and he offered me the last drag of his cigarette like it was a grand romantic gesture. We talked until the bouncers were stacking stools inside. He walked me to the canal and told me he wanted to be a teacher, not because he loved children particularly, but because he hated the idea of spending his life making rich men richer. I thought that was beautiful. I still do.
For years, we were good together. We had our places. Coffee near Stoneybatter on Sundays. Pints in The Cobblestone when his brother played fiddle. Walks through the Phoenix Park when we were broke and needed to feel like life was bigger than rent. We survived job losses, his father’s illness, my mother’s anxiety, and one winter when our bedroom window wouldn’t close and we slept in hoodies. We were proud of surviving. Maybe too proud. Survival started to look like love, and neither of us questioned it.
The first year it changed, I blamed tiredness. The second year, I blamed routine. By the third, I had stopped reaching for his hand when we crossed the road. He had stopped telling me small things, like what a child in his class had said or what song got stuck in his head on the Luas. We were not cruel to each other. That almost made it harder. There was no great betrayal, no dramatic discovery, no screaming match in the kitchen. Just a slow closing. A light going off in one room, then another.
We stayed because leaving felt wasteful. Eight years is a long time to fold up and put away. We stayed because we loved each other’s families. We stayed because Dublin rent was obscene and because our friends had started getting married and because people asked, “When is it your turn?” with such bright faces that we learned to smile without answering. We stayed because we knew how the other took their tea. Because he could tell from my footsteps if I’d had a bad day. Because I still bought his shampoo when it was on offer, and he still left the crusty bit of the lasagne for me.
The night it ended began with something stupid. We were meant to go to a birthday in Temple Bar. I came home late from work, soaked from rain, and found him ironing a shirt in the sitting room. The place smelled of damp clothes and toast. He looked up and said, “I don’t think I can do another night pretending.”
I knew what he meant immediately. That was the strange mercy of it. He didn’t have to explain. I sat down on the arm of the couch with my coat still on, water dripping onto the floorboards. For a moment I felt angry, not because he was wrong, but because he had said it first. Then I felt relief so strong it frightened me.
We didn’t go to the party. We opened a bottle of wine someone had given us the previous Christmas and drank it from mismatched mugs because all the glasses were in the dishwasher. We talked until nearly three in the morning. Not dramatically. Not perfectly. There were tears, and there were silences, but there was honesty too, the kind we had avoided for years because we thought it would destroy us. It did destroy us, in a way, but gently. Like taking down a tent after a long camping trip. You see all the places where the rain got in.
Conor said he had been lonely beside me. I said I had been grieving someone who was still in the room. He nodded at that and cried properly then, covering his face with both hands. I wanted to comfort him out of habit, but I stayed where I was. That was the first loving thing I had done in a long time: not trying to fix the pain just so I wouldn’t have to feel it.
We decided he would move in with his sister in Drumcondra for a while, and I would keep the flat until the lease ended. We split the books badly. He took my copy of a Seamus Heaney collection by mistake, and I kept his good frying pan. For weeks after, we found reasons to text. A bill. A coat. A letter. Then one day there were no more practical things left between us.</p
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
