I met him on a wet Tuesday in Dublin, the kind of evening when the buses sigh at the kerb and everyone looks like they are carrying a small private defeat. I was thirty-two, newly married, and standing under the awning outside the Abbey Theatre because I had forgotten my umbrella. He offered me half of his, not in a charming way, but in a tired, practical way, as if sharing shelter with strangers was just something decent people did.
His name was Ciarán. He worked in a bookshop near Dawson Street and had ink on his fingers from pricing second-hand poetry books. I told him I was waiting for my husband, though I wasn’t. My husband was at home in Clontarf, probably asleep on the couch with the television talking to itself. I had started going into town after work just to delay the moment of returning to a house where I felt lonelier than I ever had living alone.
Nothing happened that night except a conversation from the theatre to O’Connell Bridge. He made me laugh once, properly, from the stomach, and I remember feeling guilty about the sound of it. Before we separated, he said, “I’m in The Palace Bar most Thursdays after six, if you ever need to get out of the rain again.” I did not take his number. I told myself that meant I was safe.
Three Thursdays later, I went. I told myself I wanted a quiet pint. I told myself a lot of things in those years. He was there in the corner with a book open and his coat still on. We talked about ordinary things first: the price of rent, the buses, the terrible coffee near Pearse Street, our mothers, the kind of childhood summers that grow brighter the further away they get. He did not ask too much about my marriage, and maybe that was why I told him everything.
My marriage to Daniel lasted four years. My affair with Ciarán lasted nine.
I know how that sounds. I know there is no way to polish it into something noble. It began with pints and walks along the Liffey, then lunches in places where nobody knew us, then one afternoon in a small hotel near St Stephen’s Green when I realised I had crossed a line I could not uncross. I cried afterwards, not because I regretted being with him, but because I didn’t. That frightened me more than guilt did.
Daniel was not cruel. That was the hardest part. If he had been cruel, I could have written myself as a woman escaping. But he was gentle, distracted, and sad in a way that matched my own too closely. We had married because we thought love was the next sensible step after years together. We bought furniture, hosted dinners, discussed mortgages, and slowly stopped asking each other real questions. In the end our home became a waiting room for a life neither of us wanted to enter.
Ciarán became the place where I was awake. We never made dramatic promises. There were no stolen diamonds, no hotel balconies, no speeches about soulmates. There were shared chips on the wall at the Grand Canal, postcards slipped into books, missed calls deleted before I got home. Once, during a storm, we sat in the back of a nearly empty pub in Phibsborough and he held my hand under the table for two hours. It was the most intimate thing I had ever known, and the saddest.
When I finally left Daniel, it was not for Ciarán. That is important. I left because one morning I watched my husband butter toast and realised I had turned both of us into ghosts. I told him the truth, not every detail, but enough. He sat very still. Then he said, “I knew there was someone. I just hoped you’d choose yourself before you chose him.” I think about that sentence more often than I deserve.
The divorce was quiet and awful. We sold the house. I moved into a flat in Rathmines with a damp bedroom and a view of bins. For a while, I believed this meant Ciarán and I could finally become ordinary. We tried. He stayed over on Tuesdays. We shopped in the open, walked through Merrion Square in daylight, argued about whose turn it was to buy milk. But the affair had survived because it lived in stolen rooms and borrowed hours. In the open air, it began to change shape.
I learned that secrecy can make love
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
