I met Aoife on a wet Thursday outside Whelan’s, both of us pretending we weren’t too old to be queuing in the rain for a band we only half knew. She had mascara smudged under one eye and a paper bag from Centra tucked inside her coat like it was treasure. When she noticed me looking, she said, “It’s a chicken fillet roll. For after. You have to plan joy.” I laughed harder than the joke deserved, and she looked pleased, as if she’d handed me something fragile and I’d managed not to drop it.
For nearly three years, I loved her in the quiet, unclaimed way people in Dublin love when they are afraid to ruin a good thing. We met for coffees near Stephen’s Green, wandered through George’s Street Arcade, shared chips outside pubs after last orders, and sat on the top deck of the 46A saying everything except the obvious thing. She told me about the men she dated. I told her they sounded grand, even when they sounded terrible. She had a habit of choosing people who needed saving, men with unfinished albums, unpaid rent, complicated exes, and an emotional vocabulary made entirely of “I’m just not in a good place.”
I was always the person she came to after. After Mark forgot her birthday. After Cian kissed someone else in Workman’s. After the fella from Rathmines told her he didn’t believe in labels, then labelled someone else his girlfriend two weeks later. I knew her takeaway order, her mother’s worries, the exact silence she made when she was trying not to cry. I thought that knowing these things meant I was getting closer to being chosen. Really, it meant I had become a waiting room.
The night it changed was in November, the kind of Dublin cold that gets into your socks. Aoife rang me at half eleven, crying so hard I could barely make out the words. I was in bed in my flat in Phibsborough, half asleep, with work at seven. Still, I got dressed, walked to the bus stop, then gave up and paid for a taxi I couldn’t afford. I found her beside the canal near Portobello, wearing a silver dress under a coat far too thin for the weather. Her boyfriend, Daniel, had left her at a party because she’d asked where they were going. Not geographically. Emotionally.
She looked wrecked and beautiful, and when she saw me she folded into my arms like she had always belonged there. I took her back to mine. I made toast. I put the heating on. She sat on my couch with my duvet around her shoulders and said, “Why can’t I ever find someone like you?”
There it was, the sentence I had been waiting years to hear and dreading at the same time. I should have said it then, plainly. I should have told her that I was someone like me, that I had been right there through every disaster, every Sunday morning debrief, every “he’s not usually like that.” Instead, I smiled like a coward and said, “You will.”
She fell asleep on my couch. I sat in the armchair until dawn, watching the city lighten through the thin curtains, and something in me began to feel less romantic and more ridiculous. Not pathetic, exactly. Just tired. I was tired of being kind with an agenda, tired of calling it patience when it was fear, tired of believing love was a queue and if I stood in it long enough I’d eventually reach the front.
In the morning, she woke with a headache and shame in her face. I made coffee. She held the mug with both hands and said Daniel had texted. He was sorry. He wanted to talk. I watched her read the message twice, then a third time. Her eyes softened in the old familiar way, like a door opening for someone who had already broken the frame.
I said, “Aoife, I need to tell you something before you go.”
She looked up, and I knew she knew. Maybe she had always known. Maybe that was why she trusted me so much and so little at the same time.
I told her I loved her. Not dramatically. No speech. No demand. I told her I had loved her for years, and that I couldn’t keep being the person she ran to when someone else hurt her. I said I
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
