I met Clara because of a story I made up. That sounds romantic now, but at the time it felt like being caught stealing someone’s coat. I was thirty-two, renting a small room in Rathmines, working in a print shop near Camden Street, and writing little pieces at night because I couldn’t sleep. Most of them were about love, because love was the thing I understood least and missed most.
One rainy Thursday, I read a short piece at an open mic above a pub near Whelan’s. It was about a woman who left a red umbrella on the 46A, and a man who carried it around Dublin for a week hoping to find her. I thought it was harmless. I had never met a woman with a red umbrella. I picked the bus because half the city has been on it. I picked rain because it was Dublin. I picked longing because I was lonely.
Afterwards, while I was pretending not to care whether anyone liked it, a woman came over and asked me where I’d heard that story. She had dark curls pinned badly at the back of her head and the kind of tired eyes you get from being brave for too long. I laughed at first, thinking she was joking. Then I saw her face. She told me her sister had once left a red umbrella on the 46A after a hospital appointment, and a man had actually tried to return it through a notice in a shop window in Ranelagh. Her sister had died the year before. The umbrella was still in their hall.
I wanted the floorboards to open. I told her I was sorry at least six times. I tried to explain that I had invented it completely, that no one had told me anything, that sometimes ordinary details gather in the same shape because millions of people live under the same weather, ride the same buses, lose the same things. She listened, but I could see it didn’t help much. Grief doesn’t care about probability.
Her name was Clara. She didn’t shout. That made it worse. She only said, “It felt like you’d taken something.” Then she left before I could answer properly.
I went home that night through St Stephen’s Green, the trees shining black with rain, and I decided I would stop reading the piece. I deleted it from my phone when I got in. For a few days, I felt indignant in the private, embarrassing way people do when they know they are mostly wrong. I had done nothing deliberate. I had stolen nothing. But I had hurt someone, and intention didn’t tidy that away.
A week later, I wrote Clara a letter. Not a message, because I didn’t have her number, and not a dramatic apology, because I had already made enough drama out of an umbrella. I left the letter with the open mic host, asking him to pass it on if he saw her. I wrote that I understood if she never wanted to speak to me. I wrote that I had made the story up, but that her sister’s real story mattered more. I wrote that I was sorry for turning a shape of life into entertainment without knowing whose shadow it might cross.
Two Fridays later, Clara was waiting outside the print shop when I finished work. She had the red umbrella with her. It was bright as a warning against the grey street. She said my letter had been decent, which is not the same as forgiven, but it was more than I deserved. We walked to Grogan’s and sat outside under the heaters. She told me about her sister, Maeve, who loved bad coffee, old postcards, and men who were emotionally unavailable but good at fixing shelves. I told her about my mother in Ballymun, my
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
