I met Niamh on a wet Tuesday evening on the DART, somewhere between Tara Street and Howth. I was carrying a paper bag of lemons because I had decided, with the confidence of a man who owned one saucepan, that I was going to learn to cook properly. She was sitting across from me with sea water still in her hair, reading a book upside down. I thought it was an artistic choice until she caught me looking and said, “I’m trying to see if the ending gets better from this angle.” That was the first thing she ever said to me.
For two years after that, Howth became the place we kept returning to, as if the harbour had quietly adopted us. We had our first real date walking past the boats at Howth Harbour, eating chips too hot to hold and pretending not to mind the gulls watching us like debt collectors. We climbed the cliff path in weather that turned our faces red and honest. We sat outside cafés with coffee going cold because we were too busy talking. Niamh loved the sea because, she said, it never lied. It was calm when it was calm, wild when it was wild, and it never apologised for either.
When she got the offer from a marine research centre in Vancouver, I tried to be proud before I was frightened. She told me in St Stephen’s Green, on a bench near the pond, her fingers wrapped around mine as if she could soften the news by holding it tightly. “It’s only two years,” she said. I nodded like I believed that time was a small thing. But love can make cowards of kind people. For weeks, I became someone I didn’t recognise. I made jokes that were too sharp. I asked practical questions with bitterness hidden inside them. Where would she live? Would she come home for Christmas? Would we be the sort of people who scheduled phone calls across time zones until one of us forgot?
She never fought me back in the way I deserved. She just grew quieter. That was worse. Niamh’s silence had weight. It filled rooms. It sat with us in pubs, on buses, in the little flat we rented near Phibsborough where the heating clicked like an old metronome. The night before she left, I found her packing a blue jumper I used to wear. I said, stupidly, “You’ll have no room for that.” She looked at me for a long time and said, “I was making room.”
We decided to say goodbye at Howth because we didn’t know where else to put such a thing. The morning was bright in that fragile Dublin way, sunlight breaking through cloud as if it had won a small argument. We took the DART out without saying much. At the harbour, the air smelled of salt, diesel, and rain waiting its turn. Boats knocked gently against their ropes. A man in a wool hat was unloading crates. Life was carrying on with an almost insulting ease.
Niamh bought two teas from a kiosk and handed me one. Her hands were steady. Mine were not. We walked to the end of the pier and stood looking out at Ireland’s Eye, the wind pushing her hair across her face. I had rehearsed several speeches, all of them noble, all of them useless. In one, I promised I would wait. In another, I told her not to worry about me. In the worst one, I asked her to stay. Standing there, with the sea wide open in front of us, every rehearsed sentence felt too small.
So I told the truth. I said I was terrified she would become the best version of herself somewhere I couldn’t reach. I said I was ashamed of how I had made her happiness feel like betrayal. I said I loved her, not because she belonged beside me, but because she belonged fully to herself, and I had forgotten that for a while. The wind took some of the words, but she heard enough.
She cried then, not loudly, just with her chin tucked down and one hand over her eyes. I had seen Niamh brave in many ways, but that was the bravest: letting herself be heartbroken without turning away from me. She said, “I don’t want our love to become a cage we built out of fear.” I remember that sentence exactly. Some sentences stay in you like weather.
We stayed there for nearly an hour. We didn’t solve the future because the future did not want to be solved. We talked about small things instead: the terrible sofa in our flat, the neighbour’s dog, the first time she burned toast and blamed the toaster with legal seriousness. We laughed more than I expected. That was the strange mercy of it. The goodbye was not only sadness. It held everything at once: grief, gratitude, tenderness, and the quiet pride of
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
