I met Niamh in a queue outside a tiny café in Stoneybatter, both of us pretending not to be annoyed by the rain. She was ahead of me, holding a tote bag with leeks sticking out of it, and I was behind her rehearsing a speech I had to give later at work. When the barista told her they had run out of almond milk, she turned to me as if I had personally arranged it and said, “That’s Dublin for you. It gives you poetry and then takes away your coffee.” I laughed too loudly. She smiled. By the time we reached the till, I had offered to buy her an oat flat white, and she had corrected my pronunciation of “oat” as if we had known each other for years.
For the first three months, I tried very hard to become the man I thought she might love. I picked restaurants I had read about but couldn’t afford. I said yes to gigs when I was exhausted. I wore shirts that made me feel like I was going to a job interview. Niamh was doing her own version of it too. She laughed at my terrible jokes, pretended to enjoy hikes, and once came with me to a five-a-side match in Irishtown where she looked so cold and miserable I thought she might cry into her scarf. We were both auditioning for a relationship neither of us had actually been offered.
The trouble with trying too hard is that it feels romantic for a while. It looks like effort. It sounds like care. But underneath it, there was a quiet panic in me. I had been left before by someone who said I was “nearly enough,” and I carried that sentence around like a stone in my pocket. Niamh had been engaged once, briefly, to a man who planned their future with spreadsheets and never once asked if she was happy. So we both performed. We both smiled past discomfort. We both said, “I’m grand,” in that Irish way that can mean anything from grand to absolutely falling apart.
The night it changed, we were meant to go for dinner near Camden Street. I had booked the place two weeks in advance, checked the menu, planned the Luas times, even ironed a jacket. Then, an hour before, Niamh rang and said she couldn’t do it. Her voice was small. I could hear traffic behind her, the wet hiss of buses, maybe near the canal. I thought she was cancelling me, not the dinner. I heard my own pride arrive before my kindness did. I said, too sharply, “Right. No problem.”
There was a pause. Then she said, “I don’t want to sit across from you tonight pretending to be impressive.” That sentence found me exactly where I lived. I stood in my room in Drumcondra, looking at my stupid jacket on the bed, and felt the whole performance collapse. I told her the truth: I didn’t want to be impressive either. I wanted chips. I wanted to wear my old jumper. I wanted to not talk for ten minutes if I had nothing useful to say.
We met anyway, not at the restaurant, but outside Leo Burdock’s near Christchurch. It was raining again, because of course it was. She arrived in runners with damp hair and no make-up, carrying a book she said she had no intention of discussing intelligently. I was in the old jumper. We bought chips and stood under a ledge, burning our fingers and passing the vinegar bottle between us. For the first time, there was no stage beneath us. She told me she hated hikes. I told her I hated small plates. She admitted she only went to the football because she liked watching me shout encouragement at men who could not hear me. I admitted I had Googled “how to be spontaneous” before our second date.
We laughed so hard that a man walking past told us to “get a room,” but kindly, like a blessing. Afterwards we wandered towards Temple Bar, not going in anywhere, just letting the city make noise around us. The cobblestones shone under the streetlights. Someone was singing badly outside a pub. A hen party moved past us like a pink weather system. Niamh took my hand, and it felt different from the other times. Not electric, exactly. Sa
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
