I was twenty-three when Ciarán left Dublin, which is a terrible age to be noble about anything. He got a job in Toronto, and we stood outside Connolly Station with two coffees gone cold between us, pretending we were the kind of people who could survive distance. He said it would be one year, maybe two. I said I’d wait because I loved him, and because at twenty-three love feels like a grand promise you make to prove you are serious about life.
For the first year, I did wait. I carried him with me through the city like a second handbag. I thought of him crossing O’Connell Bridge, buying bread in Tesco, sitting upstairs on the bus to Rathmines. We spoke every Sunday night, then every second Sunday, then when one of us remembered. His life grew bigger over there. Mine became very small here. I was still working in a hotel near St Stephen’s Green, smiling at tourists while checking my phone in the staff toilet, waiting for a message that would make me feel chosen again.
By the third year, he had stopped saying when he was coming home. By the fourth, he had stopped saying home. There was no dramatic betrayal, no other woman that I knew of, no screaming row. Just the slow cruelty of absence. One day I realised I had been faithful to a ghost. I cried on the Luas from Abbey Street to Milltown, quietly, with my forehead against the window, and when I got off I deleted our old messages. Not all of them. I wasn’t that strong. But enough to breathe.
Life, stubborn as it is, kept going. I changed jobs. I learned to cook things that didn’t come from a freezer. I made new friends who only knew me as myself, not as Ciarán’s girlfriend. I started sea swimming at Dún Laoghaire with women who were older than me and far less impressed by heartbreak. “Men come and go,” one of them told me, blue-lipped and laughing, “but the Forty Foot will always try to kill you equally.”
Then I met Mark at a table quiz in The Stag’s Head. He was not the kind of man who arrived like weather. He arrived like a cup of tea placed beside you without fuss. He listened. He remembered small things. When my mother had a hospital appointment, he offered to drive without making it a performance. Loving him was not a lightning strike. It was a lamp being switched on in a room I had been sitting in for years.
We were together nearly four years when Ciarán came back. I saw his name on my phone on a wet Tuesday in November, and for a few seconds I was twenty-three again. My hands actually shook. His message was simple: “I’m in Dublin for good. Could we talk?”
I didn’t tell Mark straight away, and that told me something about myself I didn’t like. Not because I wanted Ciarán back, but because a hidden part of me wanted to stand in front of him looking well, looking loved, looking like I had won. Pride is a strange little animal. It survives long after the heart has healed.
I agreed to meet Ciarán in Bewley’s on Grafton Street on a Saturday morning. I chose daylight because I didn’t trust nostalgia after dark. He was already there when I arrived, older but unmistakably himself. The same thick hair, a bit of grey now. The same way of lifting his hand when he saw me, half apology, half charm.
For the first ten minutes, we spoke like former neighbours. His flight, my work, Dublin rents, the price of coffee. Then he looked at me properly and said, “I made a mistake.”
I had imagined those words so many times that I thought they would break me open. Instead, they landed softly, like a letter delivered to the wrong address. He told me he had been scared back then, that Toronto had swallowed him, that he thought of me often. He said he always believed we would find our way back to each other.</p
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
