I met Niamh through a window on Aungier Street, which sounds more romantic than it was. It was March, the first strange spring when Dublin went quiet and the buses rolled past with only two or three people inside them. I was living alone above a closed hair salon, working from my kitchen table, pretending I was fine. Across the lane, in the top-floor flat, there was a woman who watered a basil plant every morning in a yellow dressing gown.
At first we only nodded. Then one Friday evening, after I burned toast badly enough to set off my alarm, she slid her window up and shouted, “Are you trying to smoke us all out?” I laughed for the first time in days. The next morning, I wrote SORRY on a sheet of printer paper and held it up. She wrote back, ONLY IF YOU SHARE THE TOAST. That was how it began, with paper signs and ridiculous grins across a narrow lane full of bins and pigeons.
Her name was Niamh. She was thirty-one, from Swords, and she had a laugh that arrived before the joke was finished. She told me she was recovering from a bone marrow transplant and had to be careful in a way most people only pretended to understand. I was careful too, but mine was emotional. I had come out of a five-year relationship the previous winter and had grown used to moving through the city like a ghost, passing St Stephen’s Green and Camden Street without really seeing either of them.
We started speaking on the phone every night while sitting at our separate windows. She would make tea; I would make tea. She liked Barry’s strong enough to “stand a spoon in it.” I read her bits from whatever book I was pretending to enjoy. She told me about the nurse in St James’s who called her petal, about losing her hair, about being terrified of door handles. She did not ask me to be brave for her. That was what caught me. With Niamh, I did not have to perform the man who had everything under control.
By May, I was in love
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
