I met Aoife on a wet Thursday outside George’s Street Arcade, both of us sheltering under the same shop awning, pretending the rain might suddenly become reasonable. She had a paper bag of second-hand books pressed to her chest and one of those faces that looked like it was always halfway through forgiving someone. I offered her the dry half of my umbrella when I finally gave up waiting. She smiled and said, “Only if you’re going towards Wexford Street.” I wasn’t, but I said I was.
For six months after that, my life rearranged itself around small chances to see her. We went to Whelan’s for gigs where she knew all the opening acts. We drank coffee near St Stephen’s Green and walked the long way home through streets shining with rain. She was warm in a way that made you feel chosen, even when she wasn’t choosing you. She’d lean into me at crossings, text me songs at midnight, remember stories I’d told once and forgotten myself. Then, just as I’d begin to believe something was beginning, she’d mention someone else.
At first it was Mark, an ex who still rang her when he was lonely. Then it was Ciarán, who needed “a friend” after his breakup. Then a man from work who made her laugh but never called when he said he would. She didn’t do it cruelly. That was the worst part. Aoife never played games. She was simply drawn to unfinished people, men who arrived with emergencies instead of affection. I was steady, available, always there with a lift, a listening ear, a seat kept for her in crowded pubs. I thought patience was a kind of love. I didn’t realise I was quietly teaching her that I could survive on scraps.
The night it changed was in December, after a Christmas party near Dame Lane. She rang me at half eleven, her voice small under the noise of the street. Ciarán had left with another girl. Could I meet her? I found her outside a chipper, coat open, mascara smudged in a way she would have hated if she’d known. We walked towards the Grand Canal, the city full of office workers in paper crowns and couples arguing beside taxis. She talked for nearly an hour about how tired she was of not being picked.
I remember laughing once, not because it was funny, but because something in me finally cracked. She looked at me, hurt, and asked what was wrong. I told her the truth badly at first, then better. I said, “Aoife, you keep saying nobody chooses you. But I’ve been choosing you for months. You just keep choosing the person who won’t.”
She went very quiet. I expected an apology or a confession, the kind films promise you after a speech in the cold. Instead, she looked at the dark water and said, “I know.” Two small words. No drama. No music. Just the truth standing between us with its hands in its pockets.
That hurt more than if she had denied it. Because it meant she had seen me there the whole time. She had known what I felt, and I had known she knew, and together we had built a friendship around everything we weren’t saying. She cried then, not loudly, and told me I was the safest person in her life. A younger version of me would have taken that as hope. That night, I heard it for what it was: a beautiful sentence that did not mean love.
I walked her to a taxi on Camden Street. Before she got in, she hugged me tightly and said she didn’t want to lose me. I said I didn’t want to lose myself. It sounded harsher than I meant it, but it was the first honest thing I had done for my own heart in months.
We didn’t speak for a while after that. Dublin became awkwardly full of her. Every pub window
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