I met Aoife on a wet Thursday outside St Stephen’s Green, both of us waiting for the same late bus and pretending the rain wasn’t getting in under our collars. She had a paper bag of books from a charity shop and I had a bouquet of lilies I’d bought by mistake for a customer who never showed up at the café where I worked. When the bus finally arrived, I gave her the flowers because I didn’t want to carry them home to my bedsit in Phibsborough. She laughed like I’d handed her the moon.
For six months, she loved me in a way I didn’t know what to do with. She loved the small things first: how I remembered she hated coriander, how I walked on the outside of the footpath, how I always stopped to listen to buskers on Grafton Street even when I had nowhere to be and no money to give. Then she loved the bigger things, or what she thought were the bigger things: the version of me I had carefully built for her.
I told her I was quiet because I was shy. I told her I didn’t drink because it never agreed with me. I told her I didn’t speak to my family because we had drifted. None of that was fully false, which is how I justified it. Lies are easier to carry when they have a bone of truth inside them.
The truth was that I had spent eight months in Mountjoy for stealing from the hardware shop where I worked. Not a dramatic robbery, no balaclava, no great crime story. Just a stupid, miserable chain of taking money from the till to cover gambling debts, then taking more to cover what I had already taken. I was twenty-six, frightened, and too proud to ask anyone for help. By the time I was caught, I had become someone even I didn’t recognise.
When I came out, I promised myself I’d never lie again. Then I met Aoife, and within ten minutes I was lying by omission. She was a primary school teacher from Raheny with clear eyes and a family who ate Sunday dinner together. I was a man whose mother still cried if my name came up in the wrong tone. I convinced myself I was protecting Aoife from a past that had nothing to do with her. Really, I was protecting the way she looked at me.
We had our best night in The Cobblestone. There was music in the corner, fiddles and low singing, and she put her hand on my knee under the table like it belonged there. On the walk home along the canal, she told me she loved me. I said it back. I meant it so much that it scared me.
A week later, she asked me to come to her sister’s wedding in Wicklow. She was excited, talking about where I’d sit and how her father would like me because I was “solid.” That word broke something in me. Solid. I had built our whole life on sand.
I told her the next evening in a café on Capel Street. I had rehearsed it all day, but when the moment came, the words came out plain and ugly. I told her about the stealing, the gambling, the sentence, the shame. I told her I hadn’t placed a bet in two years. I told her I was still paying back what I owed. I told her I loved her and should have told her sooner.
She didn’t shout. That would have been easier. She just sat very still, her hands around a cup of tea gone cold, and looked past me at the window where rain was running down the glass.
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
