I met Niamh on a wet Thursday outside Dublin Castle, both of us standing under the same useless awning, pretending the rain was about to stop. She was laughing at the sky like it had told her a joke. I was twenty-six, working in a phone shop on Henry Street, and I had the confidence of a man who had never risked anything important.
She was from Sligo but living in Rathmines, studying nursing, always tired, always kind. We started with coffee on George’s Street, then pints in Kehoe’s, then long walks through St Stephen’s Green where she would talk about places she wanted to see. Canada was the big one. Vancouver. Mountains, sea, clean air, a hospital job she had circled online like it was a promise from the future.
I loved her, but I loved Dublin in a stubborn, frightened way. My father had died the year before, and my mother was living alone in Cabra. I told myself I couldn’t leave her. That was partly true. The rest of the truth was uglier: I was scared Niamh would become bigger in the world and I would feel small beside her.
When she got the job offer, we celebrated in Whelan’s. She held the email up on her phone, her hand shaking, and I kissed her like I was happy. I was happy for her. I was also already losing her in my head. On the Luas home she leaned against my shoulder and said, “Come with me for a year. Just a year. If we hate it, we’ll come back.”
I said I couldn’t. Too quickly.
She nodded, but I felt her body go still. Over the next few weeks she tried again, gently at first, then with tears, then not at all. I kept saying sensible things. Mam needs me. I can’t get a visa that fast. What would I do for work? We’ll do long distance. People do it all the time.
People do, maybe. I didn’t. Not properly.
The morning she left, we took the 16 bus to Dublin Airport because she said taxis made goodbyes feel too official. It was still dark. The city looked washed and empty, the windows of shops on O’Connell Street glowing like fish tanks. She wore a green scarf I had bought from a stall near Grafton Street. Her suitcase kept tipping over, and every time I lifted it, I wanted to say, “I’m coming.” The words sat in my throat like a stone.
At departures, she tried to smile. “You’ll visit at Christmas?”
“Of course,” I said.
She searched my face then, really searched it, and I think she knew. I think she saw the cowardice before I did.
“Don’t let your life happen to you,” she said. “You have to choose it.”
I hugged her, and she cried into my jacket. I remember the smell of her shampoo, coconut and rain, and the little bones of her back under my hands. Then she pulled away, wiped her eyes, and walked through security. She turned once. I lifted my hand. That was the last moment when everything could still have been different.
For three months we called every night. Then every second night. Then Sundays. She told me about the hospital, the snow, the apartment she shared with two other Irish girls. I told her about work, Mam, the same streets, the same pubs, the same small complaints. I could hear her life widening. Mine stayed exactly where it was.
By the following summer, we ended it on a video call. No shouting. No betrayal. Just exhaustion. She said, “I can’t keep loving someone who is always waiting to
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