I met him in Dingle when I was twenty-three and convinced my life in Dublin was only a temporary thing. I had a summer job pulling pints in a small pub off Green Street, and he was working on a fishing boat with his uncle. His name was Cian, and the first thing I noticed about him was that he always looked sunburnt and wind-battered, as if Kerry itself had been trying to keep him.
We were not careful with each other that first summer. We kissed outside Dick Mack’s after closing, walked home along the harbour with chips going cold in our hands, and made promises we had no right to make. In September, I went back to a flat in Rathmines and a receptionist job I hated. He went back to a degree in Galway he kept pretending to care about. We said we would visit, then we didn’t. But the next June, I got a message from him that only said, “Are you coming west?”
So it began. Every summer for six years, I returned to Dingle, and there he was. Sometimes he had a girlfriend in the winter. Sometimes I had someone in Dublin who liked brunch in Portobello and asked too many sensible questions. But in Dingle we belonged to each other in a way that felt outside the rules. We never spoke about September. We never asked who had been in the other person’s bed in January. We were greedy for the bright months and cowardly about the dark ones.
People think that kind of love is easy because it has no bills, no bins to put out, no damp laundry hanging over radiators. But it can be brutal, too. Every August, I felt the ending arrive before it happened. The evenings shortened. The tourists thinned. Cian would become quieter, and I would start folding my clothes into my bag as if I was packing away a version of myself I loved more than the one who got the Luas to work and ate dinner standing at the kitchen counter.
The last summer, I knew something had changed before he said it. He met me at the bus stop with the same
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