I was fifty-one the morning I saw her again, old enough to have made peace with most things and foolish enough to think the heart stays where you put it. I was standing outside Connolly Station with a paper cup of tea going cold in my hand, waiting for the DART to take me out to Howth, when a woman in a navy coat came through the doors pulling a small suitcase behind her. She stopped under the clock, looked around as if the city had changed its furniture while she was away, and then she smiled at me.
Her name was Eileen. Twenty years earlier, she had left Dublin on a wet Tuesday with no grand speech, no scene, just a letter pushed through my letterbox in Phibsborough saying she had taken a nursing job in Boston and couldn’t stay with a man who was afraid of wanting anything. I hated her for that sentence because it was true. Back then I worked nights in a printing warehouse and spent my days pretending I was too practical for marriage, children, or any sort of future that required saying things out loud. She had asked me once, sitting in Grogan’s with rain running down the windows, if I loved her enough to build a life. I made a joke about not even being able to build a shelf. She laughed, but not with her eyes.
For years after she left, I kept expecting to see her. On O’Connell Bridge. In the queue at Bewley’s. Crossing Grafton Street with her hair tucked into her scarf. Dublin is a small city when you’re trying to forget someone. Every corner becomes a witness. Eventually the sightings stopped being hope and became habit. I married a kind woman named Ruth, had a son, lost Ruth to cancer after twelve years, and learned that grief does not replace old love. It simply sits beside it, quiet and heavy.
Eileen said my name as if she had only said it yesterday. I must have looked ridiculous, frozen there with my tea, because she laughed softly and touched my sleeve. “I wrote to you,” she said. I told her I had never received a thing after that first letter. Her face changed then, just a small tightening around the mouth. She had sent three letters, she said. One after six months, one after a year, and one when her mother died and she came home for the funeral but could not bring herself to call. I had moved flats by then. The new tenant must have binned my past without knowing.
We walked because neither of us knew how to stand still. Down past the Custom House, along the river, through a city that seemed both ours and not ours. She told me she had never married. There had been someone in Boston for a while, a decent man who liked baseball and made soup when she was on late shifts, but she said she had always felt like she was living in a borrowed room. I told her about Ruth, about my son studying in Galway, about the way the house became too loud after the funeral even though no one was in it. Eileen listened without trying to tidy up my sadness. That was always her gift.
We ended up in St Stephen’s Green, sitting on a bench near the pond. It was one of those Dublin afternoons when the sky can’t decide if it wants to forgive you. She opened her bag and took out a folded photograph, worn soft at the edges. It was the two of us outside the old cinema on Abbey Street, me with a terrible jacket and her with her head tilted back laughing. “I kept it to remind myself I wasn’t imagining the happiest version of me,” she said.
I wanted to say something beautiful then. Something worthy of twenty years. Instead I said, “I was a coward.” She nodded, not cruelly. “You were young,” she said. “And I was proud.” We sat there with the ducks making small circles on the water, and for the first time I understood that some apologies arrive too late to change the past but still in time to soften it.
She had come back to clear out her mother’s old house in Marino, only for a fortnight. That was the practical reason. The real reason, she admitted, was that she had turned sixty and found herself tired of being brave in another country.
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
