I met Daniel on a wet Tuesday evening outside Connolly Station, both of us standing under the same broken bit of shelter, pretending our coats were more waterproof than they were. I had just come from visiting my mother in Beaumont, and he was on his way home from work with a brown paper bag of books under his arm. One of them slipped out and landed in a puddle. I picked it up before thinking, and he looked at me as if I’d rescued something alive.
“That’s my fault for buying poetry in the rain,” he said. It was such a Dublin thing to say, practical and ridiculous at the same time, that I laughed for the first time in weeks. I was twenty-nine then, recently separated, sleeping on my sister’s couch in Marino, carrying my life around in two tote bags and a grief I didn’t know how to explain. Daniel didn’t ask for the sad version of me that night. He just walked beside me as far as O’Connell Street, holding his ruined book like a wounded bird, talking about buses, bad coffee, and how the city always smelled different after rain.
We started meeting by accident, then on purpose. A coffee in Temple Bar. A Sunday walk through St Stephen’s Green. Pints in a quiet pub near Dame Street where the barman knew his order but not his name. Daniel was gentle in a way that made me suspicious at first. He listened without waiting to speak. He remembered small things, like the fact that I hated coriander and that I always crossed the Ha’penny Bridge too quickly because I was afraid of stopping in the middle and feeling something.
There was nothing dramatic about falling for him. No thunderbolt. No cinematic kiss under a streetlamp. It was worse than that. It was ordinary. He started to feel like the person I wanted to tell when something funny happened. He made space for me without asking me to fill it. Once, after I’d cried in the bathroom of a restaurant because my ex had texted about selling the apartment, Daniel waited outside on the quays with my scarf in his hands. He didn’t say, “You deserve better,” or “Forget him.” He just said, “You don’t have to be okay quickly.”
That sentence stayed with me. I think I loved him a little for it. But I was not free, not really. My marriage was over on paper months later, but inside me it was still ending every day. I would have bright mornings with Daniel, laughing over burnt toast in his flat in Rathmines, and then spend the evening staring at old photographs, angry at myself for missing a life that had made me lonely. Daniel never rushed me, which somehow made me feel more guilty. He was standing there with open hands, and I kept offering him pieces of myself I wasn’t sure belonged to me anymore.
The night it ended, we were walking along the Grand Canal after dinner. It was late autumn, and the trees had that tired gold look they get before they give up completely. He told me he’d been offered a job in Copenhagen. Nothing permanent yet, he said. Six months, maybe longer. He watched my face carefully, like he was hoping I might ask him to stay. I wanted to. God, I wanted to be the kind of woman who could say, “Don’t go. Choose me.” Instead, I felt panic rise in me like water.
I told him the truth, badly. I said I cared for him
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
