I met Niamh on a wet Tuesday outside Connolly Station, both of us sheltering under the same broken awning, both pretending we weren’t soaked through. I was carrying a guitar case I’d bought second-hand in Phibsborough, and she asked if I played or if I just liked looking mysterious. I told her I wrote songs. That was the first time I saw her face light up.
For the first few months, it felt like love. She came to every tiny gig I played, even the ones in rooms where the sound system hissed louder than the audience. She made posters for me, took photographs, sent my recordings to people she knew, and talked about my music as if it was already on the radio. I had never been believed in like that before. In Dublin, where everyone seemed to be rushing somewhere more important, she made my little dream feel visible.
But slowly, I noticed she was more excited by the version of me that didn’t exist yet. The successful one. The one with a tour van, interviews, a flat with a view, and songs people cried to in crowded rooms. When I was tired after my day job in a café near Grafton Street, she would tell me tiredness was ordinary and I wasn’t made for ordinary. When I wanted a quiet Sunday walking along the Grand Canal, she wanted to plan my next recording session. If I said I was scared, she called it self-sabotage. If I said I was happy as I was, she looked disappointed.
The night it ended was at Whelan’s. Not the big room, nothing glamorous. I was opening for a friend of a friend, twenty minutes before a band most people had actually come to see. Still, Niamh treated it like the beginning of everything. She brought six people from work and made me wear a jacket I hated because she said I needed to look like I meant it.
I remember standing on that small stage with my hands sweating against the guitar. Halfway through the second song, I forgot a line. It happens. Usually I would laugh, find my way back, keep going. But I looked out and saw Niamh’s face. She wasn’t embarrassed for me. She was angry for the dream. Like I had dropped something precious she had been carrying on my behalf.
After the set, she pulled me outside onto Wexford Street. The rain had stopped, and the pavement shone under the passing taxis. She didn’t ask if I was alright. She asked why I hadn’t practised more. She said opportunities don’t wait forever. She said she couldn’t keep pushing me if I wasn’t willing to become who I was supposed to be.
That sentence landed in me harder than any insult could have. Who I was supposed to be. Not who I was. Not the man standing there cold, ashamed, and exhausted, with a guitar case bumping against his knee. I realised then that I had spent a year trying to live up to someone else’s faith in me, and it had begun to feel exactly like failure.
I told her I didn’t want to talk about my career. I wanted to talk about us. About how lonely I felt beside her sometimes. About how every meal became a strategy meeting, every bad day became evidence that I wasn’t trying hard enough. She started crying, and for a moment I thought we might finally meet each other honestly. But then she said, “I just don’t want you to waste your life.”
I knew she meant it kindly. That was the hardest part. Niamh wasn’t cruel. She was generous, loyal, bright, and full of a fierce belief that could have moved mountains. But she had fallen in love with my possible future, and I was only the person standing in the way of it.
We walked to the Luas stop in silence. I wanted a dramatic ending, some line I could use later in a song, but real endings are mostly practical. She had an early meeting
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
