I met him on a wet Tuesday outside Connolly Station, both of us pretending the rain wasn’t as bad as it was. He had a paper bag from a bakery tucked under his coat and I had a broken umbrella that kept turning itself inside out like it was trying to escape Dublin altogether. He laughed first, not loudly, just enough for me to notice. Then he handed me one of the two pastries in his bag and said, “You look like someone who’s been betrayed by infrastructure.”
His name was Ciarán. He was from Galway, working in Dublin for a year on a contract with an engineering firm near the Docklands. I was thirty-four, working in a solicitor’s office off Capel Street, recently out of a relationship that had ended so quietly I still wasn’t sure whether it counted as heartbreak or just bad weather. I had become very good at keeping my days neat. Work, gym, messages I answered too late, dinner from whatever shop was still open, bed. I didn’t want drama. I didn’t want hope either, if I’m honest.
But Ciarán became part of the city for me in a way I didn’t notice until it was nearly over. We never had a grand first date. We had a succession of small Dublin evenings. Tea in Bewley’s when we were both too tired to be impressive. A walk through St Stephen’s Green where he knew the names of trees and I pretended not to be charmed by that. A pint in The Long Hall where he listened more than he spoke, and when he did speak, it was usually to ask a question I hadn’t been asked in years, like what I was afraid I’d become if nobody interrupted me.
I told him I didn’t want anything serious. He nodded as if I’d offered him a weather report. “That’s fair,” he said. “I’m not here to trap you into being happy.” That annoyed me because it was exactly the sort of sentence that made happiness sound possible.
For eight months we were not quite together and not quite apart. He kept a toothbrush at my flat in Phibsborough but never assumed he could stay. I knew how he took his coffee but not whether he was telling his family about me. We went to the Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield and held hands in the dark like teenagers, then walked home separately because I said I needed space. He never argued. That was the problem. A louder man might have forced me to define things. Ciarán simply gave me the dignity of my own confusion, and I mistook that for a lack of need.
In late November, he told me his contract was ending. We were sitting on a bench near the Grand Canal, eating chips from paper and watching a swan behave like it owned the place. He said he’d been offered a permanent role in Amsterdam. He was leaving in three weeks.
I remember nodding. I remember saying, “That’s brilliant, isn’t it?” in the exact voice people use when they are trying to be generous and have instead become furniture. He looked at me for a long moment. “It might be,” he said. “I suppose it depends what I’m leaving.”
There it was. The open door. The question with no question mark. And I walked around it. I asked about the salary, the apartment, the cycling. I made jokes about Dutch weather. He smiled, but something in him stepped back. I could feel it. It was like watching a light dim behind a curtain.
The night before he left, he invited me for one last drink in Grogan’s. I nearly didn’t go. I stood in my hallway with my coat on, keys in my hand, telling myself that endings were cleaner if you didn’t keep touching them. Then I looked at the blue toothbrush still in the cup by my sink and felt such a ridiculous surge of grief that I had to sit on the stairs.
When I got to South William Street, he was outside the pub, not inside. His suitcase was beside him. He had come straight from returning his keys. The street was shining from rain, taxis crawling past, people laughing under awnings as if the city had not just arranged a private catastrophe for me.
He said, “I didn’t think you were coming.”
I said, “
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
