#150 What if

After living more than two years in the cozy Capel Street apartment, we started looking around. Janne found a place in an area called Smithfield. We checked it out and decided right there to book it. In all the places we’ve lived, this has been the best one: the apartment, the views, the people.

Our apartment was on the fourth floor just across the original Jameson distillery. They had made it into a visitor center by then. I loved the observation platform at the top of the chimney.

We were also just across the Liffey from the Guinness Brewery, less than a kilometer (about half a mile) away. Every couple of weeks, the smell of roasted barley would fill our place. We got used to it.

We could see the Four Courts, one of my favorite buildings in town. We had an alternative cinema in the building, the Lighthouse, to feed our obsession. Dublin was full of stories for us. Smithfield was a good vantage point.

An interesting event happened on the first Sunday of every month: a horse market. We’d wake up and see hundreds of horses and people trading them just below your balcony. This controversial market has been there for hundreds of years. Even more interesting was the smell left. Who wouldn’t like the aroma of roasted barley after.

It was a very social period for us. We had good friends in the building (a colleague of Janne and her husband). I had friends from work and photography circles. We didn’t need a reason to see them anytime. We had a cozy social life. Probably we’d still be there, but I’m not a “what if” type of person.

Five months after we moved in, Janne was laid off. The financial crisis did a job on us. I decided to search for a job in Estonia as the outlook in Ireland wasn’t pretty for her. A few years later, Janne said that if she knew how returning to Estonia would be, that she’d have tried to stay in Ireland. But we didn’t go into “what if” either.

Before saying goodbye to Janne, the hardest day in my life was to bid farewell to that apartment and our life there. I made a photo of my divided shadow just across the apartment. I made another one of that last sunrise. A friend drove me to the airport.

And here you have me wondering “what if”.