I met him outside Whelan’s on a wet Thursday night, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and slowly claim you. I was waiting for my friend to finish flirting with a drummer, and he was standing under the awning, smoking a cigarette he didn’t seem to want. He asked if I had a lighter. I didn’t. He laughed and said, “That’s probably a sign I should quit.”
His name was Cian. He had tired eyes, kind hands, and the strange honesty of someone who had been hurt too recently to perform confidence. Within half an hour, over pints in The Bernard Shaw, he told me he had been dumped six weeks earlier by a woman he had planned to marry. I remember the exact way he said it, as if the words were still too big for his mouth. “I’m not really looking for anything,” he said. “I’m a bit of a mess.”
I should have taken him at his word. Instead, I heard a challenge. Or maybe I heard hope. At twenty-nine, after a long run of almost-relationships and men who kept me like a tab open in the background, his brokenness felt safer than someone fully available. A man grieving another woman couldn’t disappoint me in the usual ways, I thought. He had already declared his damage.
We started seeing each other in the soft, accidental way things begin in Dublin. Coffee near Camden Street. Walks along the Grand Canal when the evenings stretched bright and golden. Chips eaten too late outside Leo Burdock. He came to my flat in Phibsborough and fixed the loose handle on my kitchen press without making a big performance of it. I learned how he took his tea. He learned that I hated coriander and cried at old episodes of First Dates Ireland.
But she was always there, even when she wasn’t mentioned. Her name would rise between us like steam. Aoife loved that song. Aoife hated that pub. Aoife used to say the same thing. Once, in St Stephen’s Green, he called me by her name. He froze before I did. His face went white with shame. I smiled, because I was proud and foolish, and said, “Don’t worry, it happens.”
It didn’t just happen. It landed.
For three months, I told myself patience was love. I told my friends he was healing. I told my mother he was “complicated,” which is what women say when we are trying to make pain sound literary. The truth was simpler. I was standing in the hallway of a house that had not been cleared out yet, admiring the wallpaper and pretending I lived there.
The night it changed, we were in Grogan’s. It was raining again, because of course it was. He had been quiet all evening, turning his pint glass in small circles. Finally, he said Aoife had texted. She wanted to meet. “Just to talk,” he said, looking at the table instead of me.
I felt my whole body become still. Not angry at first. Just still. Like something inside me had stopped trying.
“And do you want to?” I asked.
He didn’t answer quickly enough.
There are pauses that tell the truth better than sentences. In that silence, I saw the whole shape of us. I saw every time I had made myself smaller so his grief could take up more room. I saw the carefulness, the waiting, the way I had accepted crumbs because they came from a hand I liked. I saw that I had mistaken being needed for being chosen.
He started to cry. Quietly, like he was embarrassed by it. He said he was sorry. He said I deserved better. I hated that phrase because it is usually spoken by people who have no intention of becoming better themselves.
I walked home alone through Temple Bar, past tourists singing badly and couples sharing umbrellas. My phone buzzed twice in my coat pocket, but I didn’t look. By the time I reached the quays, my face was wet from rain and crying, and I couldn’t tell which was which. The Liff
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
