I met Aoife in a queue outside a café near Grafton Street, both of us pretending we were patient people while rain slipped down the back of our coats. She was reading a paperback with a broken spine, and I was trying not to stare at the little crescent scar above her eyebrow. When she noticed, I panicked and asked if the book was any good. She said, “No, but I’m loyal to bad decisions.” That was the first thing I loved about her, though I wouldn’t have called it love then. I would have called it interest, or luck, or a decent conversation with a stranger on a wet Tuesday.
We became friends in the slow Dublin way, through borrowed cigarettes, last-minute pints, and walking each other to bus stops we did not need to go to. She lived in Rathmines with two nurses and a musician who never washed a plate. I lived in a box room in Phibsborough and worked in a bookshop where the heating failed every November. We were both twenty-six, both convinced our real lives were waiting just out of sight. Aoife wanted to move to Berlin to do illustration. I wanted to write something longer than an apologetic email. We told each other everything except the obvious thing.
The kiss happened after her going-away drinks in Whelan’s. It was late September, one of those evenings when Dublin feels briefly generous, the pavements shining, the air soft, strangers laughing like they know you. Everyone else had gone home or paired off or claimed early starts. Aoife and I stood outside under the red lights, neither of us calling a taxi. She had two weeks left before Berlin. I remember the exact weight of that knowledge between us, like a coin on the tongue.
We walked without deciding to. Down Camden Street, past chip shops and shuttered cafés, toward St Stephen’s Green. She had taken off her shoes because they were new and had made red half-moons on her heels. I carried them for her, hooked by their straps over two fingers, like some ridiculous gentleman from a film neither of us would admit to enjoying. She was tipsy but not messy, bright-eyed and sad. She kept talking about Berlin in a cheerful voice, listing practical things: deposits, tram tickets, a second-hand desk she had found online. I listened and felt a child’s resentment rise in me, not because she was leaving, but because she was brave enough to go.
At the corner near the Green, it began raining again, suddenly and hard. We ran laughing under the shelter of a shopfront. She was breathless, hair stuck to her cheek, mascara smudged at the corner of one eye. I reached out to wipe the rain from her face and stopped halfway, embarrassed by my own tenderness. She noticed. Aoife always noticed. For a second the city seemed to turn down its volume. Buses hissed past. A man shouted at nobody. Somewhere glass bottles crashed into a bin. And then she stepped closer and kissed me.
It was not dramatic in the way films teach you to expect. There was no music swelling, no lightning, no sudden certainty that everything would be simple from then on. It was careful at first, almost questioning, and then not careful at all. I remember the taste of stout on her mouth, the cold of her fingers against my wrist, the absurd pain of knowing I had wanted this for months and had hidden it so well I had nearly hidden it from myself. When we pulled apart, she laughed once, softly, like she had dropped something fragile and was waiting to see if it had broken.
I should have said something true. I should have said, “Stay,” or “I’ll visit,” or “I’m frightened this means more to me than it does to you.” Instead I said, “We’re soaked.” She nodded, and just like that we built the wall we would live with. We walked to the taxi rank by the Green. I gave her back her shoes. She put them on without looking at me
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
