I met him on a Tuesday evening in Dublin, which is to say I met him when neither of us was at our best. I was carrying a broken umbrella through the rain on Camden Street, late for a friend’s table quiz, and he was outside Whelan’s trying to light a cigarette that had already given up. He asked if I had a lighter. I said I didn’t smoke. He said, “Neither do I, really,” and put the cigarette back in the packet like it had offended him.
Inside, we ended up on the same quiz team because my friend knew his housemate. His name was Ciarán. He was funny in the way quiet people are funny, not performing for the whole table, just dropping one line under his breath and making the person beside him choke on their drink. I noticed his hands first, which embarrassed me. Then I noticed how he listened. Properly listened. When I said I worked in a charity shop near Rathmines, he asked what the strangest donation had been. When I said a wedding dress with muddy footprints on the hem, he didn’t make a joke. He said, “That sounds like a story that ended honestly.”
I was two months out of a relationship that had made me feel smaller than I was. I had promised myself I would not become one of those people who falls for the first kind man who remembers what she says. So I decided Ciarán and I would be friends. He seemed to make the same decision about me. We were very committed to it, our little performance of indifference.
We met for coffee “because we were both in town.” We went for walks along the Grand Canal “because it was good to get the steps in.” He helped me carry a second-hand bookshelf from George’s Street Arcade to my flat “because he was heading that direction,” though he lived in Phibsborough and I lived in Portobello. I started saving small observations to tell him later. A dog in a raincoat on the Luas. A man reading poetry aloud to himself outside a Centra. A woman on Grafton Street who told me my coat made me look like someone with a secret. Ciarán would smile as if I’d brought him proof the world was still interesting.
Everyone else noticed before we did, or at least before we admitted it. My friend Aoife said, “You talk about him like he’s weather.” I asked what that meant. She said, “Like he changes the whole day and you pretend he doesn’t.” I laughed too loudly and changed the subject.
The incident that changed everything happened in October, on one of those Dublin nights where the cold comes up through your shoes. Ciarán had invited a group of us to a gig near Dame Street. By then, we had spent six months pretending. Six months of nearly touching hands on pub tables and looking away first. Six months of “you looked tired today” texts. Six months of saying “you’re my favourite person to do nothing with” and acting as if that was a normal thing friends said.
That evening, only the two of us showed up. One friend had a migraine, another was “caught in work,” and Aoife later admitted she had faked a bad stomach because she was sick of us. We stood outside the venue under a leaking awning, checking our phones, both fully aware we had been abandoned on purpose.
“We can still go in,” he said.
“As friends,” I said, because I was an idiot.
“Obviously,” he said, because he was one too.
The gig was terrible. Not charmingly terrible
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
