I was twenty-one when I first loved Aoife, though at the time I thought I was older than that in every way that mattered. We met outside a lecture hall in Rathmines, both of us sheltering from rain that seemed to come sideways. She had a red scarf, wet curls stuck to her face, and the kind of laugh that made you feel included before you had earned it. For two years we were everywhere together: walking through St Stephen’s Green, sharing chips on Camden Street, sitting upstairs in pubs we could barely afford, making plans so big they had no weight.
Then her mother got sick in Cork, and Aoife went home “for a while.” I remember those exact words because I lived inside them for months. For a while. We rang at first, then texted, then apologised for not texting. I was proud and hurt and too young to understand that love is not only feeling something deeply, but knowing how to carry it when life gets heavy. The last time we spoke, she said she was exhausted. I said something cold about not being able to wait forever. She cried. I hung up. That was the ending I gave us, and for fifteen years I carried it like a stone in my coat pocket.
I built a life after that. Not a bad one. I became a primary school teacher in Drumcondra. I learned how to make coffee strong enough to forgive a Monday. I had relationships, one serious enough to nearly become a marriage, and when it ended I told people we had grown apart, which was true but not the whole truth. Some part of me always measured tenderness against a girl in a red scarf laughing in the rain.
Aoife came back on a Tuesday in October. I was in Hodges Figgis, pretending I had only come in for one book, when I heard my name said like it belonged to somebody younger. I turned and there she was, holding a poetry collection, her hair shorter, her face changed in the way faces change when life has asked a lot of them. She was still Aoife, but not the Aoife I had frozen in memory. That was the first shock.
We stood there blocking the aisle, both laughing too loudly, both saying the useless things people say when their hands are shaking. “You look well.” “You’re still in Dublin?” “God, it’s been ages.” Ages. Fifteen years reduced to a word you might use for a delayed bus. She asked if I had time for coffee. I said yes before checking anything at all.
We walked to a small café near Grafton Street. Outside, people hurried past with shopping bags and wet umbrellas, and inside we sat by the window as if we had been placed there to examine our former selves. She told me her mother had died the year after she left Dublin. She had stayed in Cork longer than planned, then moved to London, then back to Ireland for a job with a charity. She had been married for six years. It had ended kindly, she said, which sounded to me like a miracle.
When she asked about me, I gave her the neat version first. Work, family, a rented flat in Phibsborough, my father’s dodgy hip, my talent for killing basil plants. Then silence came between us, not awkward exactly, but waiting. I knew why she had really asked me for coffee. Or maybe I knew why I had said yes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before I lost courage. “For that last phone call. I was cruel because I was scared.”
Aoife looked down at her cup. For a second I saw the twenty-three-year-old she had been, tired and alone in a house full of illness, ringing a boy who wanted love to remain simple. “I was angry with you for a long time,” she said
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