I used to think missing someone was a dramatic thing, the kind of feeling that made people stand in the rain outside train stations or write long letters they never sent. Then I learned it could be much quieter than that. It could be standing in the queue at a Centra in Stoneybatter and reaching for two coffees instead of one. It could be hearing a song through the speakers in a pub and having to look down at your pint until the sting passed. It could be walking through Dublin on an ordinary Tuesday and feeling, without warning, that half the city had gone missing.
Her name was Maeve. We met when we were both twenty-four, at a table near the back of The Cobblestone, because a mutual friend had insisted neither of us was “as miserable as we looked.” Maeve had a laugh that arrived before the joke was finished. She wore red lipstick even when she was only going to the shop. She worked in a bookshop and wrote little notes on receipts, lines from poems, shopping lists, complaints about the weather. I kept nearly all of them.
We were together for six years. Not perfect years, but real ones. We rented a damp little place near Phibsborough, where the bedroom window never shut properly and the kettle sounded like it was taking off for Spain. On Sundays we walked to the Blessington Street Basin with takeaway coffees and pretended we were the sort of people who had their lives in order. She wanted to travel. I wanted to save for a mortgage. She wanted mornings full of plans. I wanted evenings that stayed the same. We loved each other, but we were always pulling gently in different directions, like two dogs tied to the same post.
The end came on a wet November night outside Heuston Station. She had been offered a job in Galway first, then another in London, and I had treated both like bad weather, something that would pass if I kept my head down. That night she told me she had accepted the London one. I remember the shine of the rain on the pavement, the buses breathing at the kerb, the way she kept touching the strap of her bag. I said all the wrong things. I said she was running away. She said I was asking her to become smaller so I could feel safe. Neither of us shouted. That was the worst of it. We were too tired to fight properly.
When her train was called, she kissed me on the cheek, not the mouth. “Mind yourself, Conor,” she said, and walked through the barrier. I stood there until the platform emptied, holding an umbrella I had forgotten to open.
For years, I told people it had been mutual. That is a useful lie in Dublin, because people accept it and buy you another drink. I said we had grown apart. I said it was for the best. But privately I missed her with a loyalty that embarrassed me. I missed her through other relationships, through birthdays, through my father’s funeral, through promotions and bad haircuts and quiet Christmas mornings. I missed her when I passed Chapters and when I saw women in red lipstick on the Luas. I missed the person I had been around her, even the foolish version of me who believed love meant staying exactly where you were.
Last summer, nine years after Heuston, I saw her again in Merrion Square. It was one of those bright Dublin afternoons when the city looks freshly washed. I was sitting on a bench eating a sandwich badly, mustard on my sleeve, when I heard someone say my name. She was standing there with a canvas bag, her hair shorter, a little silver at the temples. She looked older in the way people do when life has been honest with them. Beautiful, but not preserved.
For a second, I was twenty-four again. Then I saw the wedding ring on her hand, and the small child asleep in a buggy beside her, and time returned to its proper place.
We walked once around the square together. Her daughter slept through the whole thing, unimpressed by the emotional weight of the occasion. Maeve told me she lived in Rathmines now, that London had been good and hard, that she had come home after her mother got sick. I told her about my job, my flat, my sister’s twins, anything that sounded like a life. There was no
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