He proposed to me on a wet Friday evening in Dublin, under the trees in St Stephen’s Green, where the rain had made the paths shine like dark glass. I had been annoyed with him all day because he was jumpy and quiet, checking his phone every few minutes while pretending he wasn’t. I thought he was stressed about work. When he got down on one knee, beside the little lake with the ducks making ugly noises behind us, I actually laughed first. Not because it was funny, but because my body didn’t know what else to do with that much feeling. Then I cried, and said yes, and he held me so tightly I could feel his hands shaking through my coat.
We had been together for nearly four years. We lived in a small flat near Phibsborough, where the heating only worked when it felt like forgiving us. We had our routines: Saturday coffees, walks along the canal, cheap pints in Grogan’s when we had money, chips on the way home when we didn’t. He was gentle in ways that made me trust him. He remembered my mother’s hospital appointments. He left notes in my lunch bag. He never made me feel silly for being sensitive. So when he asked me to marry him, I thought, this is what safe love looks like. It may not be dramatic, but it stays.
Afterwards we went to a small restaurant near Grafton Street. I kept looking at the ring, moving my hand under the candlelight like a child. He smiled whenever I caught him looking, but there was something behind his smile, a tiredness I couldn’t place. Halfway through dessert, his phone lit up on the table. He turned it over too quickly. I saw the name anyway. Eimear.
Eimear was his oldest friend. I had met her maybe five or six times. She was funny and sharp, the kind of woman who made a room rearrange itself around her without trying. She had been abroad for years, then back in Dublin after a divorce. I knew they had history in the vague way women often know things before men admit them. Once, at a birthday in Temple Bar, I saw the way he went still when she touched his arm. I asked him later if anything had ever happened between them. He said no. “Not really,” he added, which should have told me everything.
That night, after the proposal, I asked him why she was texting. He said she was just congratulating us. But I hadn’t told anyone yet. My stomach dropped so fast I felt cold. He went quiet, and in that quiet I understood that the proposal had not been a beginning. It had been an ending he was trying to force into the shape of a beginning.
We walked home across the Ha’penny Bridge because neither of us could sit in a taxi with the truth pressing against the windows. The city was loud around us, all laughter and heels on cobblestones and buses sighing at stops, but between us there was nothing. Finally, near the river, he told me. Eimear had come back into his life properly six months before. They had been meeting for coffees, then long walks, then conversations he said he couldn’t have with
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
