I used to think love should feel safe. Not boring, exactly, but steady. Like the 46A arriving when the rain starts, like the lighted windows along Rathmines on a winter evening, like someone texting you to say they’ve bought milk without being asked. After years of chaos in my family, I wanted a life that could be planned in a shared Google calendar. I wanted a man who knew what a pension was, who didn’t disappear into moods, who had clean shirts drying on radiators and no wild dreams threatening the rent.
That was how I explained choosing Conor. He worked in insurance near Grand Canal Dock, had kind eyes, and never once made me wonder where I stood. We met at a friend’s birthday in Dublin, and within six months we were discussing buying an apartment in Clontarf as if love was a mortgage application we had both passed. My mother adored him. My friends said I looked calmer. I did feel calmer, in a way. But calm can be a blanket or it can be a lid.
Before Conor, there was Luca. He was from Galway but had made Dublin his kingdom of odd jobs, borrowed guitars, and late-night promises. He played small gigs in Whelan’s, busked sometimes near Grafton Street, and once took me to Sandymount Strand at midnight because he said the city looked more honest beside the sea. He was not practical. He forgot appointments, spent money the day he got it, and believed every song he wrote might change his life. Being with him felt like standing too close to a fire. I was warm, frightened, and unable to look away.
When Luca asked me to move with him to Berlin for six months, I laughed first because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. He had a friend with a sofa, a possible studio, and the kind of belief that made everything sound simple. I remember us sitting on the steps near the canal in Portobello, a bag of chips between us, and him talking about music, cheap rooms, mornings in a new city. I loved him then. I knew it so clearly it almost embarrassed me. But I also imagined my bank account, my mother’s worried face, the damp flat we could barely afford, and the terror of trusting a dream that had no proof.
I told him I couldn’t go. Worse than that, I told him I didn’t want that kind of life. I said I needed stability. I said passion was not enough. He nodded as if each word had landed somewhere heavy inside him. Two weeks later he left without me.
Conor came into my life not long after, and I let myself be grateful for the absence of drama. We got engaged on a Sunday afternoon in St Stephen’s Green, under a tree that was dropping yellow leaves onto his shoulders. Everyone cried when I sent the photo. I cried too, but later that night in the bathroom, quietly, with the tap running. I told myself it was happiness arriving in a strange shape.
The regret became impossible to ignore the month before the wedding. Conor and I were tasting cakes in a hotel off Dawson Street, and I felt like I was watching another woman smile politely through buttercream. On the way home, we passed a poster outside a small venue. Luca’s name was on it. He was back in Dublin for one night. I stopped walking. Conor looked at the poster, then at me, and something in his face changed. He knew, I think. Not the details, but enough.
I went to the gig alone. I told Conor I needed closure, which sounded mature and unselfish, though really I needed to know if the part of me I had buried was still breathing. The room was dark and crowded, smelling of stout and wet coats. When Luca came on stage, he looked older, thinner, more settled somehow. He sang a song I recognised from the time we were together, but it had grown up without me. There was a line in it about choosing a locked door because it had a nicer handle, and I felt it go through me.
Afterwards, we spoke outside in the cold. He was kind. That hurt more than anger would have. He told me Berlin had been hard, then good, then hard again. He had loved someone else. He had lost her. He was still writing.
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
