I met Eoin on a wet July evening in Dingle when I was twenty-one and pretending I was only there for the work. I had taken a summer job washing glasses in a small pub off Green Street, the sort of place where tourists came in looking for music and locals came in because they always had. Eoin was from Dublin too, though I didn’t know that at first. He was playing fiddle in the corner with two older men, his hair damp from the rain, his sleeves rolled up, his eyes closed as if the tune had lifted him out of the room completely.
After closing, he helped me stack chairs without being asked. We walked to the harbour at midnight, sharing chips from a paper bag, and discovered we had both grown up within three bus stops of each other on the northside. Back in Dublin, we might have passed in St Stephen’s Green or stood in the same queue outside Whelan’s and never spoken. But in Dingle, under the low Kerry clouds, it felt like the world had narrowed until there was only the two of us, the fishing boats, and the sound of music leaking from pub doors.
That first summer, we loved each other without making any promises. He had a place in Galway for college, I had a course in Dublin and a mother who needed me home. We knew the dates before we knew each other properly. He left on the last Sunday of August, and I watched his bus pull away with a calm face and a heart that felt like it had been dropped into the sea.
Then, the next June, he was there again. So was I. Neither of us had planned it, or at least we both claimed we hadn’t. He kissed me outside Dick Mack’s like no time had passed. That became our strange tradition. Every summer, we found each other in Dingle. We worked different jobs, rented damp rooms, swam badly at Ventry, ate breakfast rolls on the pier, and became the best versions of ourselves for eight or ten weeks at a time. In September, we returned to our real lives and behaved as if love could be seasonal, like strawberries or late sunsets.
In Dublin, we were nearly strangers. Once, I saw him across the road near Temple Bar with a girl in a red coat. He saw me too. We smiled, small and polite, and kept walking. I hated him for that smile for a full week. Then I hated myself, because we had never agreed to belong to each other outside Kerry. That was the arrangement, though neither of us had been brave enough to say it aloud.
The fifth summer was different. We were twenty-six by then. I had a proper job near Grand Canal Dock and a tiredness in me I couldn’t blame on work. Eoin arrived late in July, thinner than before, carrying a black case and a quietness I didn’t recognise. His father had died that spring. We didn’t fall into each other the way we used to. We sat on the harbour wall for a long time while he talked about hospital corridors, unpaid bills, and the terrible way grief made ordinary things feel offensive. I remember wanting to fix him, then understanding I couldn’t.
One evening, near the end of August, he asked me to come back to Dublin with him properly. Not as a summer story. Not as two people who met only where the map curled west. He said he was tired of leaving me behind and tired of pretending the leaving didn’t count. I should have been happy. I had imagined that moment for years, in different coats and different weather. But when it came, I felt the truth rise in me gently and cruelly. I loved who we were in Dingle. I did not know how to love us in traffic, bills, funerals, Monday mornings, and small disappointments.
I told him that by the water, with my hands shaking in my pockets. He didn’t argue. That hurt more than anger would have. He only nodded and
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