I met her on a Friday evening outside Busáras, in the kind of rain that makes umbrellas useless and turns everyone into a blurred version of themselves. I had just come back from Galway with one backpack, two missed calls from my landlord, and the quiet certainty that my life in Dublin had become too small for me. I was twenty-nine, newly single, and pretending to be grand with such commitment that even I nearly believed it.
She was standing under the shelter, laughing at her phone like the rain had personally offended her. Her name was Niamh. I only learned that because she turned to me and said, “You look like you’ve just been broken up with by the entire country.” I should have been insulted, but I laughed. It was the first honest sound I’d made in weeks.
We ended up walking down O’Connell Street together because the Luas was delayed and neither of us wanted to stand still. She was from Clontarf, worked in a bookshop, and had a habit of asking questions that went straight past politeness. By the time we reached the river, she knew I had quit a job I hated without having another one, that my girlfriend of four years had moved out, and that I hadn’t told my mother any of it. I knew she had a scar on her wrist from falling off a wall in Howth, that she hated coriander, and that she believed most people stayed miserable because misery was familiar.
“Come for one drink,” she said outside The Palace Bar. “You can go back to your disaster after.”
One drink became three. Then chips from Burdock’s, eaten too hot on the edge of the kerb. Then a late show in Whelan’s because she knew someone at the door, or at least claimed she did with enough confidence that nobody questioned her. I remember the room more than the band: the red walls, the heat, the backs of strangers’ heads, Niamh shouting the wrong lyrics beside me as if accuracy was less important than joy. I had forgotten that joy could arrive without asking permission.
On Saturday morning, I woke to a text from her: If you’re alive, meet me at Bewley’s in twenty minutes. I went, mostly because I had no better plan, and partly because the previous night already felt like something I might have dreamed. She was at a small table upstairs with two coffees and a notebook. “Today,” she said, “we sort you out.”
I thought she meant my CV. She did not. She made me write down every lie I had been telling people. I’m busy. I’m fine. It was mutual. I have a plan. Then she made me write the truth beside each one. I’m lonely. I’m frightened. I miss her, but I don’t want her back. I don’t know what happens next. Seeing the words on paper was like opening a window in a room I had been slowly suffocating in.
We spent the day walking. Through Grafton Street, where a busker sang “The Auld Triangle” and an old man dropped a coin into his case with great ceremony. Through St Stephen’s Green, where she told me her father had died when she was twenty-one and for a year she had answered every “How are you?” with “Not bad,” because she couldn’t bear the kindness that might follow the truth. We sat by the pond and she said, “People think honesty is dramatic. Mostly it’s just practical. It tells you where you actually are.”
That evening, we went to the Grand Canal Dock and watched the lights come on in the office windows across the water. I told her I was afraid I had wasted my twenties trying to become someone impressive instead of someone real. She didn’t comfort me in the usual way. She didn’t say I was young, or that everything happened for a reason. She just nodded and said, “Then don’t waste Sunday.”
So I didn’t. On Sunday, we took the DART to Howth. The sky had cleared into that bright, washed blue Dublin sometimes gives you after punishing you with rain. We climbed the cliff path slowly, stopping whenever the wind got too strong or one of us needed to pretend we were admiring the view while catching our breath. At the top, looking out over the sea, I rang my mother.
I told her everything. The job. The breakup. The fear. There was a long silence, and then she said, “Come for dinner on Tuesday.” I started crying, not loudly, but enough that Niamh stepped a few metres away and looked out at the gull
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
