I met Niamh on a wet Tuesday evening in Dublin, the kind of evening where the rain doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and settle into your coat. We were both sheltering under the same narrow shopfront near Grafton Street, pretending to look at our phones while waiting for the worst of it to pass. She looked over at me and said, “This city has a personal issue with umbrellas.” I laughed harder than the joke deserved, and that was the beginning of the most important almost of my life.
At the time, I was twenty-six, working in a bookshop near Trinity, living in a flatshare in Rathmines, and convinced that love was something that arrived dramatically, like in films. Niamh worked in a café off South William Street and studied art part-time. She had paint under her nails more often than not, a voice that softened when she spoke about old buildings, and a habit of noticing things nobody else did. A loose tile. A lonely glove on a railing. The exact colour of the sky before rain.
We became friends quickly, almost suspiciously quickly. She started dropping into the shop after her shifts, saying she was only browsing, though she rarely bought anything. I’d make excuses to walk her to the Luas, then we’d somehow keep walking. We had our places. Coffee in the Powerscourt Centre when one of us was broke. Pints in Grogan’s when one of us was sad. Long loops around St Stephen’s Green when neither of us wanted to go home yet.
Everyone thought we were together. My housemates teased me. Her friends raised their eyebrows when I appeared at birthday drinks. Even strangers seemed to assume it. Once, in a charity shop on Camden Street, an older woman behind the counter told us we made a lovely couple. Niamh smiled and said thank you before I could correct her. I carried that thank you around for weeks like a secret blessing.
But we were not together. There was always something unnamed between us, and I was both terrified of naming it and exhausted from carrying it. She had come out of a long relationship before we met, one that had left her careful with herself. I understood that, or I told myself I did. I became patient in the way people become patient when they are secretly hoping to be rewarded for it.
The closest I came to telling her was one December night after we walked along the River Liffey, the city bright with Christmas lights and buskers playing songs everyone knew. She had linked her arm through mine because the path was slippery, and for a while we walked like that in silence. Near the Ha’penny Bridge, she stopped and said, “I feel safe with you.”
I should have said it then. I should have told her that I loved her, not in the dramatic way I had once imagined, but in the ordinary way that had become much more dangerous. I loved the texts she sent when she saw a ridiculous dog. I loved how she always gave coins to the same man outside the Centra on Dame Street and asked his name every time though she already knew it. I loved the tiny frown she made when she was trying not to cry. Instead, I said, “You are safe with me.”
And I meant it. That was the problem.
A few months later, she told me she had been accepted onto a residency in Berlin. She said it in the bookshop, standing between Irish fiction and poetry, holding a second-hand copy of something she never planned to read. Her eyes were bright, but her hands were shaking. I hugged her and said I was proud. I was proud. I was also devastated in a way that embarrassed me.
The night before she left, we went to the Long Hall. It was raining again, of course. Dublin loves symmetry. We sat in a corner under the red glow of the lamps, talking about nothing important because the important thing was too large to touch. At closing time, we walked toward Pearse Street, where she was staying with her sister before the early flight. Outside her door, she turned to me and said, “I need to ask you something, and I need you to be honest.”
I knew before she asked. Maybe she knew before she asked too.
“Did you ever want this to be more than it was?”
There are moments in life that split you into the person you were before and the person you have to become after. I wanted to lie. I wanted to protect the friendship, protect her, protect myself from hearing what I already feared. But I had loved her too much to be dishonest at the end.
“Yes,” I said. “I did. I do.”
She closed her eyes, just for a second. When she opened them, there were tears there. “I thought so,” she
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
