I met Niamh on a wet Tuesday outside St Stephen’s Green, both of us pretending we were too proud to run for the same Luas. She had a paper bag of books pressed under her coat and I had a coffee going cold in my hand. A gust of wind turned her umbrella inside out, and she laughed so hard at the betrayal of it that I offered her mine before I thought better of it. She said, “You’ll get soaked.” I said, “I’m from Dublin. I was born soaked.” It was the first thing I ever said to her, and for years afterwards I wrote it down every January, as if preserving the sentence could preserve the person.
We were together for three years. Not in the dramatic way people describe when they want to sound ruined. We were ordinary. We bought reduced flowers from Tesco on Camden Street. We argued about whether Phoenix Park was too far to walk on a Sunday. We had one favourite table in Grogan’s, although it was everyone’s favourite table, and we acted personally wounded when strangers got there first. She worked in a school in Rathmines and I was trying to become a writer, which mostly meant I was broke and pretending rejection emails were part of an artistic process.
Niamh believed in me with a steadiness I didn’t understand at the time. She would read my drafts on the 15 bus, marking sentences with a blue pen, never cruel, always exact. “You’re hiding here,” she’d say, circling a paragraph. “Say what you mean.” I loved her for that, and I resented her for that too, because being seen clearly is not always comfortable.
Every year, on the anniversary of the day we met, I wrote about her. The first year it was a little piece about the umbrella, and I left it folded inside a copy of Dubliners on our shelf. The second year it was about the way she sang the wrong lyrics while making tea. The third year it was about her hands, always ink-stained, always warm. I never showed her any of it. I told myself the pieces were too sentimental, that they’d embarrass us both, but the truth was simpler and worse. I was afraid she would read them and realise I loved her more honestly on the page than I did in real life.
When things ended, it was quiet. She got an offer to teach in Galway. I had just been taken on for freelance work in Dublin and acted as if leaving the city for her would be the end of me. We sat by the canal near Portobello with two takeaway coffees between us, cooling untouched. She said, “I don’t want to be the only brave one.” I didn’t have an answer. I thought love meant feeling deeply. She thought it meant moving your feet.
After she left, I kept writing about her every January. It became a private ritual, a little annual wound. I wrote about seeing a woman in a red scarf near Trinity College and following her for half a street before realising it wasn’t Niamh. I wrote about the year it snowed and Dublin went soft and quiet, and I imagined her classroom in Galway empty for the day. I wrote about dating other people and comparing them unfairly to someone who had become, in my mind, more memory than woman.
Then, last year, I saw her again. It was in The Winding Stair, of all places, on a bright cold afternoon when the Liffey looked like folded tin. She was at the counter paying for a book, her hair shorter, a silver ring on her right
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
