I met him on a wet Thursday in Dublin, the kind of evening where the city looks like it has been varnished. We were both at a leaving do in Whelan’s, standing slightly outside the circle of noise, holding pints we weren’t really drinking. I had a boyfriend at home in Rathmines who had stopped asking how my day was. He had a girlfriend in Phibsborough who, from what he told me later, loved him in a way that made him feel guilty rather than known.
We were not strangers. We worked in the same office near Grand Canal Dock, but we had always kept each other at a careful distance. There are people you can joke with safely, and then there are people who make silence feel dangerous. He was the second kind. That night, someone put on a song from our college years, and everyone roared along badly. He looked at me across the table and smiled as if we were the only two sober people in a room full of actors.
At half eleven, I went outside for air. Camden Street was busy and shining, taxis crawling past, smokers huddled under doorways, laughter spilling out of pubs. He came out a minute later, not pretending it was a coincidence. We stood under the awning, close enough that our sleeves touched. He asked, “Are you happy?” and I remember being annoyed by how simple the question was. I had spent months making my unhappiness complicated so I wouldn’t have to do anything about it.
I told him I was fine. He nodded like he didn’t believe me but respected the lie. Then he said, “I’m not.”
That was the moment the night changed. Not with romance, not really, but with permission. We walked down toward St Stephen’s Green because neither of us wanted to go back inside. The rain had softened to mist. I told him about the tiny resentments that had become the furniture of my relationship: the unanswered messages, the dinners eaten in front of separate screens, the way my boyfriend and I spoke mostly about bins, bills and whose turn it was to be tired. He told me about waking beside someone kind and feeling lonelier than he did when he was alone.
It would be easy to make it sound noble, but it wasn’t. There was want in it too. When we stopped by the gates of the Green, he took my hand. I let him. That small thing felt louder than any kiss. My phone buzzed in my coat pocket with a message from my boyfriend: “You coming home?” His phone buzzed too. We both looked down at our screens, then at each other, and I felt the full ugliness of what we were doing. Not because we had slept together, because we hadn’t. Not because we had made promises, because we hadn’t. But because in our hearts, for that hour, we had chosen each other instead of the people waiting for us.
He said, “We can’t start like this.”
I wanted to hate him for being decent at the exact wrong time. Instead I started crying, quietly and embarrassingly, on the path near St Stephen’s Green while strangers walked past with chips and umbrellas. He didn’t hug me at first. I think he knew if he did, we might pretend comfort was the same as permission. Eventually he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Go home. Tell the truth you owe. I’ll do the same.”
So that was how the night ended. Not in a bed. Not with some dramatic declaration under the streetlights. We separated at the Luas stop like two people leaving a funeral. I went home to Rathmines and sat at the kitchen table until my boyfriend came in wearing the guarded face of someone who already knows. I told him I had feelings for someone else. I told him nothing had happened, which was true, and also not the whole truth. He asked if I still loved him. I said I
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
