I met you the year before your mother died. You were just back from travelling and your left arm was freckled. I can only presume your right arm was too, but it was covered in tattoos. I used to stare at that arm in the middle of the night. I asked you once to leave it blank and you just looked at me. I didn’t know what that look meant, but then I didn’t know you very well. 

On our first date, we went to a cheap Korean restaurant nestled between the Liffey and Jervis Street centre. You were late, so I rang my sister to tell her what I was wearing. She concluded I was overdressed. 

‘You should have worn jeans,’ she said, matter-of-factly. 

We had matched on Tinder, but I already knew you or at least knew of you, as is often the case in Dublin. It was the first time I had ever used a dating app, and at age twenty-three, I felt prehistoric. 

You were so late, or at least I thought you were. When I decided I couldn’t resist any longer, I made my way through the small supermarket that preceded the restaurant - that was when I saw you. You looked up and frustration flashed across your face before you could stop it. 

‘You’re here,’ I said, stating the obvious. ‘I was waiting outside.’ 

Your face softened and you pointed at the chair in front of you. It was an awkwardly high chair and you looked on, bemused, as I struggled to climb up. We both ordered bibimbap and as I had never tasted it before, I felt very cosmopolitan. 

The first night you brought me home, I panicked. I stood in your room, naked save for a pair of tights, and counted. I counted to ten in my head. I must have looked mad because you kept saying my name, and after I got to ten, I bolted. I shoved my dress over my head and ran. I rang the man I loved, who didn’t love me, on WhatsApp. The time difference meant that he was in the queue for the bank, and I was walking down Leinster Street at 3 a.m. He laughed when he heard about me and you, me standing in the room counting to ten. 

‘What did you tell him?’ he said.

‘Nothing, I just left.’ 

‘You didn’t even say sorry?’ 

‘No, it didn’t come to me.’

A few weeks later I messaged you: ‘Are you in town?’ There had been weeks of silence and then this. We both pretended it wasn’t out of the ordinary. I was standing in the middle of a pub on Dame Street, and I was drunk; the kind of drunk where your shoes have been discarded, your makeup smudged. I was thinking about your room. You had painted it black. There had been no bed frame, just a mattress lying on the floor. You agreed to meet me in the Globe. It was open late, and you had just finished work. I made my excuses to my friends and went to wait for you.