I met Conor on a wet Tuesday evening outside Pearse Station, both of us trapped under the same narrow shop awning while rain came down like someone had opened the sky with a knife. He was in a navy suit, holding a laptop bag against his chest as if it contained a small animal. I was carrying tulips wrapped in brown paper for my mother, and when one of the stems snapped, he looked genuinely heartbroken for me. “That one had plans,” he said. I laughed before I could stop myself.
For the next two years, I measured my life in the small rituals we built around Dublin. Sunday walks along the Grand Canal. Cheap noodles on Camden Street. Pints in Kehoe’s when we were pretending we were only having one. He loved the city in a restless way, always talking about what it could become, what he could become inside it. I loved it more quietly. I liked knowing the same bus driver on the 46A, the same woman selling flowers near Grafton Street, the same patch of grass in St Stephen’s Green where the sun landed at half four in May.
Conor worked in finance in the Docklands, in one of those glass buildings that looked beautiful from the outside and exhausted everyone within. He was clever, ambitious, and permanently half-somewhere else. Even when he was holding my hand, part of him seemed to be answering an email in his head. I used to tease him about it. “You’ll miss your own wedding if someone puts a meeting in the calendar,” I’d say. He would kiss my forehead and promise me he wouldn’t.
The job offer came from London in October. Senior role, huge pay rise, a title that made his father quiet with pride. He told me in a café near Merrion Square, where the windows had steamed up and the waitress kept forgetting our order. At first I thought he was telling me because we were going to discuss it, the way couples discuss big things. I imagined weekend flights, or maybe me moving too, though my whole life was here. My mother was recovering from surgery in Beaumont. My sister had just had a baby in Tallaght. I had a teaching job in Rathmines that made me tired but useful.
Then he said, “I’ve accepted it.”
I remember the sound of a spoon hitting a saucer at the next table. That tiny, bright noise. I asked him when he had decided. He looked down at his coffee and said, “I didn’t want to worry you until it was real.” It was already real, then. Real without me. Real before I had been invited into it.
We tried, for a while, to pretend the decision had not cracked something open. He said London was only an hour away. He said people did long distance all the time. He said it was temporary, just a few years to build something. I asked what we were building. He didn’t answer quickly enough.
His leaving party was in a bar near Grand Canal Dock, full of men in crisp shirts and women with perfect hair, everyone talking loudly over music I couldn’t feel. They toasted him like he was going to war and coming back a hero. I stood beside him while he accepted congratulations, his arm around my waist, his mind already across the water. Someone asked if I was moving too. Before I could answer, Conor said, “We’ll see how it goes.”
That was the moment I knew. Not when he accepted the job. Not when he booked the flight. It was those five words. We’ll see how it goes. Our love, which I had carried like something sacred, had become an experiment in his mouth.
After the party, we walked along the Liffey. The Samuel Beckett Bridge was lit up white against the dark, and the water looked black and cold. He was tipsy and excited, talking about office views, new clients, a flat he might share in Canary Wharf. I stopped near the bridge and asked, “If I told you I couldn’t do this, would you stay?”
He went very still. That was his answer before he spoke. Then he said, gently, terribly, “I can’t make my life smaller.”
I didn’t shout. I wish sometimes I had. I wish I had given the river all the anger in me. Instead, I nodded like he had
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
