I met Niamh on a wet Thursday evening outside George’s Street Arcade, when both of us were pretending we hadn’t forgotten our umbrellas. She laughed first, which I liked, because I was never brave enough to start anything in those days. We stood under the same shop awning until the rain softened, then went for coffee we both claimed we didn’t have time for. That was the beginning of nearly four years of my life.
People always ask when a relationship ended, as if there is one clean moment where love shuts like a door. For me, it ended in small ways long before the afternoon she actually walked away. It ended in the silences after work, in the dinners where we spoke more to our phones than to each other, in the plans we postponed until they became a kind of fiction. But I didn’t see it then. Or maybe I did, and I loved her too much to admit that love can be present and still not be enough.
We lived in a small flat near Harold’s Cross. There was a leak above the kitchen window, one radiator that rattled like it was haunted, and a view of a brick wall that Niamh somehow made beautiful by putting basil, mint, and one stubborn lavender plant on the sill. She was the sort of person who made a place feel chosen. I was the sort of person who kept waiting for life to settle before I enjoyed it.
That was our main trouble, I think. She wanted movement. I wanted safety. She talked about Galway, Berlin, maybe going back to study art therapy. I talked about rent, bills, my job in an insurance office, and how we should wait until the timing was better. Timing became my excuse for everything. I thought being careful was the same as being loyal. She thought it was fear dressed up as responsibility.
The last day was a Sunday in October. Dublin had that pale, washed-out light that makes the city look gentle even when you are falling apart. We had gone for a walk through St Stephen’s Green, because it was what we used to do when we were happy and didn’t know we were happy. I bought two coffees from a kiosk, hers with oat milk, no sugar. I remember being proud that I still knew her order, as if remembering a coffee could make up for all the ways I had stopped paying attention.
She was quiet by the lake, watching the ducks cut through the water. I started talking about Christmas, about maybe visiting my mother in Kildare, about maybe looking at bigger flats in the new year. She didn’t interrupt me. That was worse than if she had. She just held the cup between both hands and nodded with a sadness that made me stop mid-sentence.
“I can’t keep living in your maybes,” she said.
I tried to answer quickly, because quick answers were my habit. I said we could talk properly, that things had been stressful, that I knew I had been distant. I said I loved her. That part was true. It is still true in a quiet, harmless way, the way an old scar is true.
She looked at me then, and there was no anger in her face. That frightened me more than anger would have. Anger would have meant there was still something to fight over. What she had was exhaustion. Not dramatic, not cruel. Just the look of someone who had packed her heart days or weeks before and was only now carrying it out the door.
She told me she had taken a room in Ranelagh with a friend from work. She had moved some things already. The lavender plant, she said, was still on the kitchen sill because she thought I might keep it
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