I met Clara on a wet Thursday evening outside Trinity College Dublin, both of us pretending we were not lost. She was holding a broken umbrella like it had personally betrayed her, and I was trying to look confident while my phone spun uselessly on one percent battery. We were both looking for the same poetry reading on Dawson Street, and by the time we found the place, soaked through and laughing, the event had already finished.
Instead of going home, we went for a pint. That was how it began. Not dramatically, not with music swelling or the universe moving aside for us, but with two damp strangers in a corner of a crowded Dublin pub, sharing chips and talking too honestly because there was no reason not to. She was from Galway, working in a bookshop near Grafton Street. I was from Tallaght, doing a job in insurance that I kept calling temporary even though I had been there five years.
Clara had a way of listening that made you improve the truth. Not lie, exactly, but reach for the best version of what you meant. With her, I said things I usually swallowed. I told her I was afraid my life had become too small. She told me she was leaving for Berlin in six weeks, and that she had accepted the job before she met me, which made us both laugh because we had known each other for less than two hours.
Six weeks is a dangerous amount of time. Long enough to fall in love if you are foolish, short enough to pretend you are not. We walked everywhere. Along the Liffey when the water looked like folded steel. Through St Stephen’s Green on lunch breaks. Down side streets where the Georgian doors shone after rain. We drank coffee we could not afford and made promises we had no right making. She showed me the quiet corner of the National Gallery where she went when she felt overwhelmed. I took her to the Forty Foot at sunrise, though neither of us was brave enough to swim.
We never said we were together. We were too careful for that, or too frightened. We spoke around the truth. She would say, “If I was staying,” and I would say, “If you weren’t going,” and then we would change the subject. But some evenings, when she fell asleep with her head against my shoulder on the Luas, I would let myself imagine ordinary things. Buying bread. Arguing about laundry. Meeting her mother. A life made not of grand gestures but of shared keys and familiar footsteps.
The night before she left, Dublin was unusually warm. We had dinner in Temple Bar, somewhere too busy and too expensive, and afterwards we walked without deciding where to go. Neither of us wanted to be the person who suggested the end of the evening. We crossed Ha’penny Bridge and stood halfway over it, watching tourists take photographs and buses glow red in the dark.
Clara was quieter than usual. She kept rubbing her thumb over the strap of her bag. I had planned to be noble. I had planned to say that Berlin would be brilliant, that we would stay in touch, that I was happy for her. But when the moment came, all I could think was that the city would look exactly the same tomorrow and she would not be in it.
At Connolly Station the next morning, I carried her suitcase even though it had wheels. Her train to the airport was not for another ten minutes, and those ten minutes stretched and collapsed at the same time. Announcements echoed over us. People hurried around with coffees and backpacks, stepping into the rest of their lives. Clara looked at me and smiled, but her eyes were wet.
“Don’t make it harder,” she said softly.
“I was going to ask you to stay,” I said.
She closed her eyes for a second, and I knew I had been cruel, even if I meant it as love. When she opened them, she touched my face with both hands. “I know.”
The kiss happened then, just before goodbye. Not gentle, not cinematic, not polite. It was desperate and full of everything we had refused to say. It tasted of coffee, salt, and panic. Her fingers gripped the back of my coat as if the force of holding on might change timetables, flights, whole countries. I forgot the station, the crowd, the announcement calling her platform. For a few seconds, there was only her mouth, her breath, the terrible certainty that love can arrive too late and still be real.
Then she stepped back. Her lipstick was smudged, and she laughed once, brokenly, as if embarrassed by her own heart. She took the suitcase from me. I wanted to say something unforgettable, something worthy of the moment, but all I managed was, “Text me when you land.”
She nodded. “I will.”
And she did. For a while, we wrote every day. Then every few days. Then on birthdays and Christmas. There was no betrayal, no dramatic ending. Just distance doing what distance does, gently and without apology. She built a life in Berlin. I left the insurance job and started working for a charity near Christchurch. I became braver, I think, because she had once seen that in me before I did
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
