I met him because of a bag of oranges. It was April 2020, when Dublin had gone quiet in a way I had never heard before. I was living in a flat above a closed hairdresser in Portobello, working from my kitchen table, trying not to count the sirens. A neighbour had put a note in the hallway asking if anyone could collect a prescription and a few groceries for a man in the next building who was cocooning after a bone marrow transplant. I was lonely enough to volunteer before I had time to be nervous.
His name was Cian. He was thirty-two, pale as paper, with a shaved head and a laugh that arrived before his words did. I left the shopping outside his door, knocked, and stepped back to the stairs. He opened the door wearing blue gloves and a mask, and the first thing he said was, “You got the good oranges. That’s a serious character reference.”
After that, I started doing his shopping every Tuesday. At first we only spoke through the gap in the door. Then he began leaving notes in the empty shopping bags. Small things. A review of the biscuits I’d chosen. A complaint about the weather. A drawing of a pigeon he insisted was stalking him from the windowsill. I began writing back. I told him about the fox I saw near the canal, the bread I kept failing to bake, the woman downstairs who sang along to Christy Moore every evening at six.
By May, we were talking on the phone for hours. He had grown up in Raheny, worked as a sound engineer, and missed pubs with a physical ache. Not drinking, he said, just the noise of them, the human muddle. He used to do small gigs around Smithfield and once spent a whole night in The Cobblestone arguing with a banjo player about whether sadness could be inherited. He said things like that, half joking, half not, and I found myself writing them down after we hung up.
The strange thing was how quickly the absence of touch became its own kind of presence. I knew the exact shape of his voice when he was tired. I knew he
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
