I met her in Donegal because I had run away from Dublin without admitting that was what I was doing. I told people I needed air. I told my mother I wanted to see the cliffs. The truth was I had been left by someone I thought I would marry, and the flat in Phibsborough had become too full of ordinary things that hurt me: two mugs, one toothbrush missing, the silence after work.
I took a bus north on a Friday in October, with a backpack, a raincoat, and no real plan beyond getting as far from my own thoughts as possible. By the time I reached Donegal town, the sky had turned the colour of wet slate. The woman at the guesthouse warned me not to go near the coast the next day, but sadness makes you foolish. I rented a small car and drove towards Slieve League because I wanted to stand somewhere dramatic and feel my pain had proper scenery.
The storm arrived faster than sense. One minute I was walking along a road with sheep staring at me like disappointed aunties, and the next the rain came sideways, hard enough to sting. The wind shoved at my chest. My phone had no signal, my jacket was useless, and I realised, with sudden embarrassment, that heartbreak had not made me poetic at all. It had made me a freezing eejit on a cliff road in Donegal.
I saw the light of a small shelter near a bend in the road and ran for it. She was already there, sitting on the wooden bench with a knitted hat pulled low and a sketchbook tucked inside her coat. She looked up and laughed, not unkindly, as if I had arrived exactly on cue.
“You’re not from around here,” she said.
“Is it the drowning look?” I asked.
“It’s the shoes.”
Her name was Aoife. She was from Letterkenny but living in Galway, back home for her uncle’s anniversary mass. She had come out to draw the cliffs and had been trapped by the storm too. For nearly an hour we sat in that shelter while the Atlantic threw itself at the world. We shouted over the wind, then stopped shouting and just listened. She handed me a flask of tea without making a fuss of it. I remember the warmth of it more than almost anything.
There was nothing glamorous about us. My hair was plastered to my forehead. Her hands were stained with pencil lead. At one point the roof leaked directly onto my knee and she laughed so hard she snorted. But I told her things I had not told my best friends in Dublin. I told her how ashamed I felt to be thirty-two and starting again. She told me her father had died the year before and that grief had made every room feel slightly tilted. We were strangers, so there was no performance. No history to defend. Just rain, tea, and the strange safety of a person you may never see again.
When the storm eased, she offered me a lift back towards Carrick in her battered blue Fiesta, which smelled of turf smoke and oranges. We stopped in a pub with the fire lit and ordered soup. I can still see her across the table, drawing little waves on a napkin while telling me that people talk too much about finding themselves, as if we are lost keys. “Maybe we are built again,” she said, “bit by bit, by whoever is kind to us at the right time.”
I asked if I could see her again. She looked out the window at the rain sliding down the glass and said, “If you ask me tomorrow, when the weather is normal, I’ll believe you.”
The next morning I did. I found her number written inside my
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