I used to believe love stories were like fingerprints. I thought if something had happened to you in a certain way, under a certain light, with a certain person, then it belonged to you alone. That belief lasted until a rainy Tuesday in Dublin, when a stranger messaged me to say I had written her life.
I was volunteering at a small creative night near Temple Bar then, helping collect short pieces from people who wanted to read them aloud. I had written one myself, a fictional piece about two people who kept meeting on the same bench in St Stephen’s Green, both pretending to read, both too shy to speak until one of them left a note inside a second-hand book. It was nothing extraordinary. A little lonely, a little hopeful. I had made it up on the Luas after seeing a man asleep with a bouquet of lilies on his lap.
The night after it was read, I got the message. Her name was Niamh. She said the story was about her and her ex-boyfriend, right down to the bench, the book, and the note. She wasn’t angry exactly, but she was shaken. “Who told you?” she asked. “Was it him?”
I remember sitting in my kitchen in Rathmines with my tea going cold, feeling like I had accidentally stepped into someone’s locked room. I wrote back explaining that I didn’t know her, didn’t know him, and had invented it. She didn’t believe me. I don’t blame her. If I had heard a stranger tell the shape of my grief in public, I might not have believed them either.
We agreed to meet the next day outside Dublin Castle, where there were enough people around for both of us to feel safe and enough space for an awkward conversation. She arrived in a navy coat, hair damp from the rain, holding a copy of the book I had named in the piece. When she showed me the inside cover, there it was: a note in blue ink from a man called Ciarán. Not my invented Ciarán, because I hadn’t named the man at all, but her real one.
For a few minutes we just stood there under the grey sky, both embarrassed by the coincidence. Then she started laughing, and because she laughed, I did too. Not because it was funny, but because it was too strange to hold seriously for long. She told me her version. They had met near St Stephen’s Green during lunch breaks. He had left her a note in a copy of Persuasion. They had loved each other badly for two years, in the way people do when they are kind but not ready. My fictional ending had them meeting again. Her real ending had him moving to Galway without saying goodbye properly.
I apologised anyway. She said I didn’t need to, but she thanked me for meeting her. We walked toward George’s Street and ended up getting coffee because neither of us wanted to go back to our own lives yet. That was the part I never could have invented: how quickly suspicion can become recognition when two people are honest and tired.
Niamh and I became friends after that. Slowly, then all at once. She came to more readings. I learned she worked in a pharmacy, hated coriander, and cried every Christmas Eve no matter how good the year had been. She learned that I wrote sad stories because I was afraid to ask for happy things. We never dressed it up as fate. We were both too sensible for that. But there was tenderness in the way we kept choosing to meet.
Six months later, she invited me for a walk along the Grand Canal. It was one of those evenings when the city looks briefly forgiven, the water holding the last of the light, bicycles clicking past, someone laughing outside a pub as
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
