The last time I saw her was at Heuston Station, standing under the big clock with a green suitcase beside her and a paper coffee going cold in her hand. It was a wet Tuesday in November, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang around you. I remember thinking the station looked too ordinary for what was happening. People were buying crisps, checking platforms, kissing cheeks, complaining about delays. My whole life was cracking open and a man beside me was arguing with a vending machine.
We had been together almost four years. We met outside a charity shop near Camden Street when she laughed at me for buying a coat two sizes too big because I liked the lining. She was studying art history then, and I was working nights in a hotel, convinced that being tired all the time made me interesting. We built a small Dublin life out of cheap things: chips after closing, walks along the Grand Canal, pints in The Cobblestone when we could afford them, Sunday mornings in Phoenix Park pretending we were people who had a plan.
She had a plan before I did. That was the problem, or part of it. She got offered a place on a conservation programme in Cork, the kind of opportunity she had spoken about in a careful voice for years, as if saying it too loudly would scare it off. I said I was delighted. I was delighted. But I was also terrified. I had grown used to her being the shape of my future. I didn’t know how to imagine a week without her leaving hair clips on my windowsill or texting me pictures of strange dogs she met on the street.
For a while we tried to be noble about it. We made lists. We talked about trains, weekends, rent, schedules. Then the conversations became arguments wearing good coats. I accused her of choosing a city over me. She accused me, rightly, of wanting her to make herself smaller so I could feel safe. The night before she left, we sat in my flat in Stoneybatter with a takeaway between us that neither of us touched. I said, “If you go, I don’t think we’ll survive it.” She looked at me for a long time and said, “If I stay because of that, I won’t survive myself.”
I didn’t sleep. By morning I had invented a speech. It was a dramatic thing, full of apologies and promises. I was going to tell her I’d move too, find work anywhere, carry boxes, learn to cook properly, become the sort of man who didn’t make love feel like a negotiation. On the Luas to Heuston, I repeated the words in my head until they sounded false. When I found her under the clock, everything I had prepared fell away. She looked exhausted, but not uncertain. That was what broke my heart most. Not that she was leaving, but that leaving had already made her stand straighter.
We had twenty minutes before her train. We bought coffees we didn’t drink. She told me her mother had packed sandwiches as if Cork was across the Atlantic. I told her my da had asked after her and then gone quiet, which was his version of grief. We laughed, and the laugh nearly undid us both. I wanted to touch her face but didn’t know if I still had the right. She solved it by taking my hand.
“I don’t want our last memory to be a fight,” she said.
<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
