I met her because I was late, which is still the most Dublin thing that has ever happened to me. It was raining sideways outside Heuston Station, the kind of rain that makes umbrellas look foolish, and I had missed the Luas by maybe ten seconds. I stood there pretending not to be annoyed, with my work shoes filling slowly with water, when a woman beside me laughed to herself. Not at me exactly, but at the whole situation. She said, “You’d swear the city waits until you’re having a bad day to show you what it can do.”
Her name was Mara. She had a yellow scarf, a paper bag from a bakery crushed against her coat, and a calmness I envied immediately. I had just come from visiting my father in St James’s Hospital. He was recovering from a fall, nothing dramatic in the medical sense, but it had frightened me more than I wanted to admit. I was thirty-two and still convinced my parents were part of the furniture of the world. That evening, for the first time, I understood they were only people, breakable and brave in ways I had never noticed.
Mara and I got on the next Luas together. There were no seats, so we stood near the doors, rocking with the stops, and talked like people who had known each other longer than thirteen minutes. She told me she taught art to children in Inchicore. I told her I worked in accounts and had recently begun to suspect spreadsheets were eating my soul. She said that was a serious condition and should be treated with chips from Burdock’s at the earliest opportunity. When she got off at Smithfield, she turned back and said, “If your soul survives the night, I’m usually in the Lighthouse on Thursdays.” Then the doors closed.
I did not go that Thursday. I went the following one, which I told myself was less desperate. She was sitting in the café with a book open and a coffee gone cold beside her. I remember being struck by how ordinary the moment was. No music swelled, no spotlight dropped from the ceiling. She just looked up and smiled, and something in me unclenched.
For six months, Dublin became a map of small kindnesses. We walked the long way through Phoenix Park even when the wind bullied us. We shared bowls of soup in The Woollen Mills and argued gently about whether the Ha’penny Bridge was romantic or simply overcrowded. She came with me once to visit my father, bringing him a sketch she had made of the old Guinness gates because he had worked near there as a young man. He looked at her over the top of his glasses and said, “She sees things properly, this one.” I think that was the moment I started loving her in a way I couldn’t joke my way around.
But love arrived with bad timing. Mara had applied for a residency in Berlin before we met. She told me about it on a Sunday evening along the Grand Canal, near Portobello, where the water was dark and still and the ducks looked annoyed by everyone. She had been accepted. Three months, maybe six. “I should be happy,” she said, and I could hear the guilt in her voice, as if my feelings were a fragile cup she was afraid of dropping.
I said all the right things badly. I told her she had to go, that it was brilliant, that I was proud of her. Then I became quiet for two weeks. Not cruel, not distant enough to be accused of anything, just smaller. I answered messages late. I made myself
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