I met him on a wet Thursday evening outside St Stephen’s Green, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as settle into your bones. I was standing under the shelter of a bus stop, carrying a paper bag of books from Hodges Figgis and trying to convince myself I didn’t need a taxi. He asked if the 15 had gone, and I said, “Probably, because that’s what buses do when you need them.” He laughed like I had said something brilliant. That was the first thing I noticed about him, not his face or his coat or the way his hair curled at the ends from the rain, but how easily he gave laughter away.
We ended up talking all the way to Rathmines. I learned he was a primary school teacher, that he hated mushrooms, that he had grown up near Clontarf, and that he had a habit of buying books he never finished. I told him I worked in a small design office off Dame Street and had recently come out of a relationship that left me feeling like I had been slowly edited out of my own life. He listened properly. Not waiting-for-his-turn listening, but the rare kind where someone’s whole face softens because they have heard you.
Just before my stop, he said, “I should tell you something before I ask for your number.” I smiled, already stupid with hope. Then he said, “I’m engaged.”
It was such a clean sentence for such a messy thing. I remember the bus lights, the fog on the window, the little jolt in my stomach. I said, “Then you definitely shouldn’t ask for my number.” He nodded, ashamed but not surprised, like he had expected me to be better than the situation. When I got off, I felt oddly proud of myself for about ten seconds, and then I cried the whole walk home.
I wish I could say that was the end of it. It wasn’t. Dublin is too small when you want to avoid someone and too large when you want to find them. Two weeks later, I saw him in Bewley’s on Grafton Street, sitting alone with a coffee and a stack of copybooks. He stood when he saw me. I should have waved and kept going, but I didn’t. I sat down.
He told me her name was Laura. They had been together seven years. Their families loved each other. The wedding was booked in Wicklow for September. He said all of this with no bitterness, which somehow made it harder. He wasn’t painting her as cruel or wrong so I could step into the story as the better woman. He said, “She’s good. That’s part of the problem. I keep wishing she’d do something unforgivable, because then leaving would make sense to everyone.”
I told him that was cowardly. He said he knew. Then we sat in silence while the rain hit the upstairs windows, and I felt the strange ache of liking someone more because they had told the truth badly but still told it.
For a month, we behaved almost respectably and also not respectably at all. We didn’t kiss. We didn’t meet at night. But we sent each other messages we had no business sending. Photos of the sky over the Grand Canal. Lines from books. Small jokes that became private. It was intimacy with its hands clean, or so I tried to tell myself. But every time my phone lit up, I knew another woman somewhere was trusting him, and
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
