I met him on a wet Thursday outside the Dublin Busáras, the kind of rain that doesn’t fall so much as sit on your shoulders and ask personal questions. I had just left a job interview on Talbot Street that I knew I hadn’t got. My shoes were leaking, my CV was softening in my bag, and I was trying very hard not to cry in public because Dublin has a way of making your private disappointments feel like street theatre.
He was standing beside me under a green umbrella that had one bent rib, reading a paperback with the confidence of someone who believed the bus would arrive when it felt like it. I remember being annoyed by how calm he looked. Then a taxi went through a puddle and sent a wave over my tights, and I said something under my breath that was not suitable for a first meeting. He looked up, held the umbrella slightly towards me, and said, “You can stand here if you don’t mind the left side dripping.”
That was how it began. Not with fireworks, not with music, not even with a proper hello. Just a half-broken umbrella and two strangers pretending it was normal to stand shoulder to shoulder in the rain.
His name was Cian. He lived in Drumcondra, worked nights in a hotel near the quays, and had the softest laugh I’d ever heard. I told him about the interview, and he told me that once he had gone to an interview with toothpaste on his jumper and only noticed it on the way home. By the time the bus came, I had stopped feeling like the world had personally selected me for humiliation.
He got off before me and handed me the umbrella. I said I couldn’t take it, but he said, “You can return it when you’re rich and famous.” I thought it was a throwaway line, but he had written his number on the inside of the strap in blue pen, the ink already blurring from the rain.
I texted him two days later because I was terrified of seeming too eager, which is funny now because I spent the next year being eager about everything to do with him. We had our first coffee near St Stephen’s Green, then walked until our hands accidentally brushed enough times that one of us had to be brave. It was him. He took my hand crossing Grafton Street, and I remember thinking how strange it was that life could change while waiting for a green man.
We were together for three years. Not perfect years, but real ones. We learned each other’s shops, moods, silences. We had chips after bad days, sat on the wall at the Grand Canal with paper cups of tea, and once spent an entire Sunday in the National Gallery because neither of us wanted to admit we were too broke to do anything else. He was steady in a way I wasn’t. I was always reaching for the next thing, the better job, the bigger room, the future version of myself who had everything sorted. Cian loved what was in front of him. For a long time, I thought that meant he lacked ambition. Later, I understood it was a kind of courage.
The umbrella stayed by my front door through all of it. It became a joke between us. Whenever it rained, he’d say, “That’s technically mine,” and I’d say, “Take me to court.” The bent rib got worse. The handle cracked. Still, I kept it, even after we moved in together near Phibsborough and bought two sensible black umbrellas from Penneys. I think I kept it because it proved something tender about the beginning, something I could touch when ordinary life made love feel less cinematic.
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