Like most mornings, I peel myself away from the warmth of my bed at 5:25am, blinking my eyes into the dim light of my lamp willing myself to wake and see despite blurry eyes.

I tread slowly towards the kitchen and click the kettle on, set to work brushing my teeth, eyeing my mouthwash wondering, must I? Because for whatever reason, I resent the extra step of oral hygiene despite using said mouthwash every morning (still can’t determine why this is).

I brush my hair into a bun with my new silky, spotty scrunchie and collect the strays at the back with four bobby pins and assess my work: not bad for the bob I’m once again getting used to. After this I dress in my favourite workout attire – a matching leopard print set with coral trim that doubles as swimwear that I keep getting compliments on because… well, it is undeniably fun.

Next, I fill my hot water bottle for my drive, throw a load of washing on, wriggle back into my stripy thermal pants that I slept in, grab my Sherpa jacket on the end of my bed and head for the car.

This morning’s Pilates class was hot strength, and the instructor was filled with so much infectious joy and enthusiasm that I had to laugh and smile along with her because she was just so happy. It was so pure. I thought, there’s a woman who really loves what she does, and she’s genuinely brilliant at it – I am a big fan of her classes, sequencing, and playlists (must remember to give this feedback on the app). At the end of the class I’m almost crying, which happens sometimes… I think it’s endorphins. I haven’t researched this yet.

I get back home and after showering, make the same breakfast that I’ve been consuming every morning for the last three months: a piece of seeded toast with hummus, two fried eggs (sometimes poached), fried cherry tomatoes and pak choy with a large quantity of garlic, drizzled with Umami Papi’s chilli oil. I’m on my fourth jar of it. It makes me think of my friend Jess, and how, despite us not having lived together for close to two years now, the last time I saw her she teased me about my hyper fixation meals, still able to list the ingredients to my famous ‘one pan dish’ that I so frequently cooked when we lived in Thebarton together. (chicken, red onion, zucchini, lemon slices, stock).

After my dishes I wash my hands thoroughly with soap and start my morning skincare regime that I recently changed, which seems to be paying off. Not sure my skin has ever looked this hydrated before in all of my (almost) 31 years. Toner, under eye patches, vitamin C serum, moisturiser, sunscreen.

I sit at the dining table with my ‘grocery’ journal – it’s the journal that I own strictly for writing my shopping lists and ripping the page out to take along with me to the supermarket – and concentrate on what I need, and what I want to eat this week. Of course, I decide on sticking with the hyper fixation breakfast and stocking up on the regular supplies and then determine that I absolutely want slow cooked Mexican chicken to use in tacos, and that I want to try a new recipe I found on Instagram. Some kind of chicken meatballs with paprika and rice and other things. Looks saucy. Looks simple. Is definitely GF and DF.

Following this, I put together my outfit. This is something that (and this will absolutely sound gloaty and vain but I don’t care) I used to be so good at. Miss chic. Miss fashionista. Miss used to be an influencer. Until I got in my head about everything and truly believed that to try was to… not be an intelligent feminist? I don’t know. That’s the simple version. It’s too nuanced and that’s not what I’m here to gab about. But long story short I’ve at long last remembered the joy of putting in effort and feeling good about myself when I leave the house. I love clothes so much, and I can’t believe I ever thought that was dumb and frivolous. We live, we learn, yada yada yada. (I’m so back though).

I decide on my black and silver New Balance 740’s, navy pinstripe pants, a white t-shirt with my new baby blue v neck op-shop jumper that looks like it could’ve been borrowed from Rachel Green’s wardrobe, and then I throw on my (also thrifted) chocolate brown leather coat, redo my bun, make a coffee in my ten year old KeepCup (brag), and head back to the car with my favourite shopping bags in my (also) chocolate brown oversized handbag.

I know the common attitude towards grocery shopping is generally, ‘no thanks’ and very ala Homer Simpson in that episode about garbage collection, ‘can’t someone else do it!?’, but I genuinely love it. And I love it even more now that I’ve denounced Coles, moved to Foodland, and discovered they have cup holders in their trollies.

One air-pod in, my hand-written shopping list in tow, I cruise the aisles at such a leisurely rate I think it would definitely be appropriate if I went on Thursday pension days.

I get to the cleaning aisle and scan the stock for Scrub Daddy. It’s been too long a hiatus from him, and I miss him. I miss his texture and his ability to scrub my egg residue off of my stainless-steel pan with such little effort – truly nobody does it like Scrub Daddy. Was that all initially funded by Shark Tank? I think yes. Will also google this.

But I digress. I found a Stitch (Lilo and Stitch) Scrub Daddy. Amazing. Because, about a month ago I was genuinely being haunted by Stitch and thought as I continued to see him EVERYWHERE, am I on the cusp of spiritual psychosis? Undetermined. I’m fine though, I swear. But I had to buy it because well, it’s just too funny not to. I wonder if my roommates will say anything. They knew all about the Sitch saga. As did many of my friends. (you have to believe me when I say it just got so strange).

I send a photo of the sponge to my friends Amelia and Kelly. Kelly later asks if I’m free for a post-work cuppa. And then I think that maybe I summoned her when I used the essential oil that she bought for me this morning.

I pop Stitch on the kitchen basin and put the ingredients into the slow cooker: two large chicken breasts, one packet of taco seasoning, an eye-balled amount of salsa, and one third of a cup of chicken stock. I turn the slow-cooker to high, put the lid on, grab my thongs, my basket of clean/wet laundry and head once more, to the car.

11:28am – 4:11pm

“Hi, how can I help you?” the woman perched at the counter buffing a customer’s nail asks me. “Hi, could I please get shellac and a pedicure?” She gestures at a free spot on the bench and smiles at me, goes back to her buffing and tiny power tools until minutes later another woman approaches me with the basket of nail polish colours I am to rifle through, though I already know what colour I’m getting.

We spend the next forty or so minutes mostly in tandem silence. I zone out watching the tv. The Block is on. And it’s been so many years since I’ve watched free to air tv I forget how trashy Australian reality television truly is. How fictional. But still. I watch until my eyes feel like they’ve turned square the way adults warned you as a child would happen.
“And a pedicure too?” she asks after I’ve done the last rounds of the UV light hand oven. “Yes please”.

I take the middle seat out of the small row of massage chairs, and I’m adjusted this way and that. My legs are so short my toes can’t reach the water and I feel like a child dangling their legs, la la la.

Eventually the pedicure begins. My second ever pedicure! How nice to be able to afford things for myself again outside of bills and rent and food. I remember earlier in the year at the job I really believed was my legitimate ticket into the writing industry, fate, my dream job, as I broke down at my desk and tried to stifle the tears that were pouring out of me, and my colleague asked if I had anything I could sell to get by. “But all of the things that are worth anything are very much things I’d like to keep.”

The woman begins to direct me and my feet. One in, one out. Both in, both out. She gently exfoliates my calves before directing me again. Both back in. She’s like a very calm and gentle traffic controller tending to my lower limbs. Next is moisturiser. I peer over my book, and it looks like two long lines of kewpie mayo running along my shins. After this there are hot stones and a warm flannel. More direction. More touch. And I register that it’s the most (welcomed) touch I’ve had in a long time outside of hugs with friends and my sister and my nephew Rudy clinging to me like a large koala. I love him so much, sometimes I think my brain can’t actually fathom it.

The pedicure itself is fast. The massage chair is going to town. I’m completely enthralled in my book. No idea how much time has passed.
“Is it your day off?” another woman with an incredibly chic bob asks as she passes me on her way to what I can only assume is a staff room. “Sure is, today is my Saturday and my Sunday.” We exchange small smiles and go our separate directions – she to her lunch, me back to my book. Hot for queer literature at the moment. More on that another day.

The toe separators are removed and after more indeterminate time, and I slip into my thongs for the day’s final errand.

I don’t know how I always time the laundromat so perfectly. Especially considering how un-regimented this is. I never go on the same day or at the same time and yet. There is always at least one dryer left, and nobody in sight.

When we hit peak winter, bone-chilling winter, I threw the towel in with the clothesline. Took cash out and decided it would be my dryer allowance for the season. Told myself I wasn’t lazy, I was actually just being quite efficient and respected myself too much to risk smelling like the residual damp that lingers when clothes take far too long to dry on their own. Now, much like grocery shopping, I love going to the laundromat. Even with its bright green eye-sore of a feature wall. An older couple enter moments before my cycle is about to end and sit on the opposite side of the wall to me. My eyes naturally veer in their direction before I spot a small bundle of what looks like black socks next to their empty washing basket.

“Excuse me,” I say to them, “but are these your socks?” “These ones?” “Yeah, I lost a sock last week when I came here.” She drops her phone on the ground in the process of grabbing the socks and I hand it back to her before she hands me the socks I enquired about. “Hm, nope, not mine.” “They’ve gone to the land of lost socks” she jokes. “As they are so good at doing. Thanks anyways.”

I get back home and heat up a bowl of leftover Thai green curry that I made on Sunday night. Truly my best batch yet and all because I FINALLY learnt to stop adding so many bloody vegetables.

I put on an episode of Sex and The City – it’s the one where Carrie learns Big never wants to get married again, Samantha treats the Turtle as a fixer-upper, and Charlotte becomes a vibrator addict after Miranda suggests they should all invest in a rabbit. Which was also my first vibrator, though I suspect mine was not also made in the 90’s.

I fold and put away my washing. Tidy my room so that when Kelly comes over she’s under the impression that this is how I always live: neat and tidy. Why the façade when she knows I’m type B. Perhaps not a façade. Perhaps, just motivation to have my space feel right for when I later crawl into bed, and burn my favourite stick of Japanese incense.

Amidst my tidy I eye the earrings on my dresser that I received as a surprise gift with a handbag I bought off of a UK girly on Vinted. It/they arrived last night, and it made my entire week. To be surprised by a stranger? With earrings that match the bag I purchased and a handwritten note inside the tissue paper she’d wrapped the earrings in: Happy Birthday Girl! with a love heart? And all because I’d asked if it was possible for her to ship it the week that I bought it because I wanted to have it in time for my birthday and was concerned about international shipping times. Women. We’re just… so brilliant.

4:46pm – 8:19pm

Kelly arrives just before 5pm. We change our minds, and the tea is subbed out for wine. Heater on in the living room, I put on a Queen record I borrowed from the library, which is fitting, because Kelly for as long as I have known her (eighteen whole years), has always been a Queen girly no thanks to her brilliant dad, Scotty.

We veer this way and that conversationally, as per. Past, present, future. After nearly two decades, how can we not?

“do you have any recurring dreams?” she asks. “have I not told you about the one I had as a kid??” “No, I don’t think so.” “Yeah, the one where I was sitting at the table eating ham steak and then I looked at my palm and all of my fingers were hovering above it, and then my palm turned INTO a ham steak.” “WHAT” she wheezes. “Yeah, I had it all the time.”

My roommate messages the group chat about the census, “we have to do it tonight or we get fined.” I poke my head into her room where she’s laying with her partner. “Should we just bang this out all together and get this over with?” They both join Kelly and I in the lounge room and by the time we’ve submitted it, we all bureaucratically understand ourselves a little more than we did twenty minutes prior.

8:19pm – 8:43pm

Now it’s 8:20pm and Kelly left ten minutes ago, and I’m here finishing writing this… public journal entry? I guess that’s what it is.

I’ll hop in the shower in a minute. Wrap myself up in my freshly washed and dried dressing gown. Do my night-time skincare regime, and no doubt I’ll be asleep by 9:45pm at the latest. Ready again, for another 5:25am wake up.

It is a pleasure, to recognise how I move through my days. And an even greater pleasure, to be satisfied with how I choose to spend my time.

Is one day off a week ideal? Certainly not. I am tired and my work-life balance is not balanced at all and I have a fear that sits beyond the surface of everything that asks, are we pursuing our dreams though? And I have to tell the voice that we are still playing catch up from being criminally underpaid earlier in the year in pursuit of said dreams. That there has to be seasons for everything. And that this winter, is for starting at the beginning and building upwards again in a different direction. And that none of this is permanent anyway.

I wish I could describe to you right now how intrinsically this is all tied to self-respect and authenticity, but I’d like to go to bed now. Perhaps another day, though.

Four Fridays ago I was having the kind of day that (female) directors end films about female protagonists with.
Picture this if you will: a woman (it’s me) at a small table sat by a window in a winery, a burning fire place adjacent to her, two black labradors lying beside her feet (they are not her labradors), a copy of RUSSH spread open, and a journal beside it with defined dot points of gratitude marking the page. She appears well rounded, calm, and serene. She appears at peace. She is talking to the owner of the winery about ceramics, clay, and glazes, as though she knows what she is talking about. As though she ever fired and finished any of the pieces she hand-built during COVID lockdown. As though they did not sit in a cupboard next to the sink for over a year until the cupboard began to harbour an undefinable smell.

Friday, May 29th 2026

Grateful.
Grateful that I have become, or am becoming the kind of woman who wants time to neither speed up, nor slow down.
Grateful that I have grown into a woman who carries pens and tampons with her at all times. And paw paw and a rogue snack because ever since I quit vaping I can’t stop chewing on my lips and eating all of the time.
Grateful to be food motivated.
Grateful for a body that moves and moves well despite the endo.
Grateful also to be the kind of woman who now, can indulge sporadically. Because god this wine tastes divine in this moment.
Grateful to have a day to myself.
Grateful for no routine or road map.
Grateful for all of the strangers I’ve gabbed with and for the delicious coffee I bought myself this morning.

I’m not trying to brag, but I was having a fantastic day. Like, the kind of day that you spring out of bed for as if you’re a cartoon character whose emotional baseline is thrice that of a dog who’s just heard the word “walk”.
I was carpe-diem-ing! bitch! I was cliff-top beach walking at seven o’clock in the morning, singing out loud in the wind. I was treating myself to a gourmet breakfast (yes, I’ll take the double hash stack with bacon, add an extra poached egg, please) AND a mocha, wedging myself comfortably between my server and her regular’s banter that I was completely unfamiliar with. I was chuckling at home-made garment tags at a vintage store that read things like, ‘the 90’s are calling, are you ready to answer?’. I even went to the lengths of purchasing a Gentle Habits oil perfume roller, because if there was ever a day to declare a newfound scent for myself, it was this day. $50 for 10ml? Ring her up babe, I’m a new woman! I practically cart-wheeled back to the car (I have never done a cartwheel in my life, this is hyperbole).

After this brilliant morning of totally indulging my every whim, I stopped by a winery that my friend Chandler and I had passed weeks prior, and decided I had one final impulse to relish before heading back home - a single glass of pinot noir. I was in the deep south of Adelaide (wine county) so it was really more a rite of passage.
I sat by the aforementioned fireplace and for the first time in months, I wrote because I had the desire to, and not because I felt like I should. Saying I felt inspired would be a stretch and quite false - I didn’t feel inspired by any particular means, but I didn’t feel any pressure and the way that I felt myself b r e a t h e in that moment was as close to peacefully unhurried as I’ve come to in a really long time. It was as if my creative soul and self had finally caught up to regular me, or rather, I’d caught up to her, and neither one of us was out of breath or impatient or frustrated. It was like, oh cool, I’m so glad you’re finally here and it’s really great to see you. Should we take a second to recognise that? Perfect! I’d be happy to.
And I/we were happy too, and it felt so wonderful to be not just optimistic, but impassioned and hopeful and grateful. To just have a day without the undercurrent of reprimand because I wasn’t putting any pressure on myself to do or be or create something. (I’m a virgo with PMDD and ADHD trying to pursue a career in writing for crying out loud; my mental real estate sign frequently reads, IN PURGATORY, SEND HELP).
It was just one of those magical days where I knew that a piece of me had returned to myself after an extensive period and that actually, instead of wanting to squeeze the hell out of that feeling and bottle it up for fear of it slipping through my fingers again, I was really quite ok with that energy coming and going if it needed to. As quickly as it arrived, I understood that it would come back again if I were to momentarily lose the essence of it. There was this beautiful sense of confidence and resolve to that moment, a recognition of myself of sorts.
So you can imagine my absolute despair when the day, my day, that was bubbling over because my cup felt so full, was knocked loose from my grip. Because of a man. Because that evening, I let a person I didn’t know that well into my home for dinner and he did what men historically do; like a thief in the night, he encroached on my space and he took from me.
Incredible isn’t it, how they move through life without being cognisant that their actions might actually have lasting repercussions on another person’s life.

**To contextually set the scene, I need to provide some important details.
Firstly, during this particular week I was staying at my sister’s house ala-Airbnb style whilst she was living la vida loca in Bali with my brother in law and nephews on holiday. Secondly, I was driving her car whilst they were away because mine had finally decided that actually, sixteen thousand kilometres IS a really long time to go without a service, and it slipped into a mechanical coma before being hauled onto a tow truck. Thirdly, the man, which perhaps we’ll call the surfer, and I had taken advantage of my being in the same area as him and a week prior, had taken a leisurely beach stroll together. It’s also worth mentioning that despite having each other on Instagram for years and matching several times on dating apps, I’d never met him prior to the walk. And also that the walk was fine. I’d even go as far as to say that the walk was fun.**

When the surfer and I first made plans for the beach walk, I initially had to postpone due to my car troubles and he was generous enough to offer me a lift to undetermined places should I need it. I mean, the guy hadn’t even met me yet and he was willing to cart me around? I naively mistook that as confirmation of his having a good nature.
And I did in fact, need a lift a week later to the mechanic to pick my car up, because my sister was coming home and unfortunately, I could not continue to drive her Mazda with it’s seat heaters and reversing camera and automated wipers and all of the luxuries that my car could never afford me. So, given he lived all of five minutes away, I asked him for a lift from my sister’s to the mechanic, and in exchange, I offered to cook him dinner at my place afterwards as a thank you. It was a done deal, he told me. He would see me on Friday at four thirty in the afternoon.

[Now, obviously I’m experiencing this magical, wondrous day on Friday where everything inside of me is teeming with possibility and confidence. And so I’m considering the future events of the evening, and what measures I owe myself to take so that I can ensure that I’m not left with feelings of regret or bewilderment (which is kind of often the case after I spend time with a man, right?). So, I conclude that I won’t drink, and if I want to, I might kiss him, and then I figuratively dust my hands off and sit on the couch, waiting for him to arrive.]

Friday arrives and four thirty comes and goes. Then… 4:40pm comes and goes. And what a surprise, 4:50pm also comes and goes. Until finally, after half an hour of radio silence, at 5pm I hear a car honking out the front, which causes me to briefly wonder, just how badly do I need to collect my car?
I lock the door behind me, climb inside of his car, and offer my best sing-song, helloooo to him, and he responds by offering me a beer. “Oh wait,” he says, “you can’t drink beer can you?”. “Nooope” I offer, “no gluten for me.” But this doesn’t stop him from cracking open a cold one for himself. For a thirty-five minute drive. For a trip to the mechanic. I again wonder how badly it is that I need my car for the weekend. Too little, too late I suppose. All aboard the DUI train.

Before we arrive at mine in our separate cars, we’ve already discussed the logistics of dinner on the way to the mechanic — we’ll stop at Coles, grab the ingredients for carbonara, and meander next door to grab a bottle of wine because it seems that my arms are made entirely of rubber.
At my house and shopping in tow, he waltzes in the front door after I unlock it and beelines it for the kitchen ahead of me as though he’s been to my house more times than he could count on both hands. I didn’t really know what to make of the confidence to be completely honest. Normally that kind of behaviour would (admittedly) partially amuse me, but in this instance? I didn’t love it. Something about it felt overbearing and presumptuous. Probably when he walked ahead of me as though I were a guest in my own home.
Moments later in the kitchen, I found him chopping the garlic and finishing the remnants of the second beer that he had brought for me. I hadn’t even gotten around to opening the wine, nor had he offered.

After dinner, we moved from the dining table to the lounge room, where we were flicking through my roommates’ records, and he was telling me what to play. Not asking, nor suggesting, just point-blank telling me what to put on next. (If it were possible to turn back time, that’s the moment I’d go back to so that I could suggest he stream whatever album he’d decided on in the privacy of his car on his drive home by himself). And I still couldn’t determine whether he was an abrasive man, or if he was in fact just an incredibly forthright, confident person in a way that I myself had never personally experienced before. He took up space in such a natural, deliberate manner, for a moment I wondered if I was actually envious of his ability to stretch himself out beyond the confines of what I understood and have been socialised to recognise as ‘normal’ behaviour or, a ‘normal’ amount of space to take up.
It was there in the living room on the couch when we were talking that I looked down at the coffee table and realised that I hadn’t finished either one of the glasses of wine that he’d poured for me. He’d just continued to top up my glass incrementally when he found that his own was empty, which was happening quite frequently. In other words, he was drinking very quickly, I was drinking very slowly. Both acts, inarguably, felt deliberate.

After gabbing on the couch for a little while, a moment of intense eye contact led to him saying, “come here” to me. I put my glass back down on the coffee table, and he leant in for a kiss. The kiss that I had predetermined would be allowed if I were into the idea of the kiss. The kiss that was supposed to end, at a kiss. But with overzealous men like this, does it ever end, at just a kiss?
Despite my attempts at speaking at a perceptible volume with my body language — unbudging knees curled up against my chest — his hands, which had already crept underneath my top without my consent quickly found themselves at the button of my jeans just as fast as the panic in me began to rise. Say you can’t, say you can’t, say you can’t, I repeated to myself. That mantra, in that moment, felt like my lifeline. I’d been here before, I recognised the ways that I was crawling back inside of myself and I recognised that I had begun to dissociate. I knew I had begun fawning and I was clutching at those words in a very desperate plea to myself, as though I was having anaesthesia administered and I was trying to reach the number ‘1’ before a twilight-sleep set in. “Mm—”, I finally got out as I pulled back, “I need to take this really slowly.” He released his hands from my jeans and with an incredible amount of audacity, he actually had the gaul to ask, “why?”. “Uh… um… it’s uh… just, I have some stuff?” I responded with the all of the confidence of a self-conscious teenager, “and I just know… that yeah… like I’ll freak out afterwards?” “Don’t worry about it, it’s all good”, he said, dismissing me entirely before moments later nose diving back toward my mouth.
He continued kissing me, and I didn’t stop him, I didn’t say no. In fact, I kissed him back. He then pulled me to a standing position and without a word, removed all of my clothes whilst standing behind me, and I didn’t stop him, I didn’t say no. He touched my body as I stared at the wall, and still, I didn’t stop him, I didn’t say no. Until moments later, I seemingly came back into the body he had decided was some kind of personal pleasure portal to be taken advantage of before the clock struck out on him. I tapped him on the shoulders and addressed the wall, “I need to call things here,” I said, not quite firmly, nor with much courage either. “Come onnnn” he pleaded with me, “but it would feel sooo good.” “Mm-mm.” was all I could manage. I had not, in fact, returned to my body at all. His demeanour quickly shifted, and he offered to retrieve my underwear for me.

Dressed and sitting back on the couch together, he reached for his phone and pulled up the New York Times Games website and we started to play Connections. I was subpar at best, and in comparison to my mediocre guesses, it felt like he was on fire. I considered my sobriety in that moment and realised that I didn’t feel tipsy or impaired by alcohol by any measure. I wasn’t sure that I’d even had two standard glasses of wine, yet the bottle was empty. “What’s going on, you’re supposed to be the one with all the words!” he joked. “Yeah, I don’t know where they’ve all gone.” I responded. It felt like there was a small band of low humming crickets in my head in place of my own mind. “Okay,” he said as we finished minutes later with just two rows, “should we go to bed?” We?
He walked into my bedroom, deduced what side of the bed I slept on and reached for the edge of the quilt before asking, “Oh, is it all good that I stay here?” I considered his two beers and the empty bottle of wine. I considered his ‘long’ drive back home and the favour that he’d done for me in taking me to the mechanic. I considered what it might feel like for him if I were to say what I wanted to, which was no. “Yeah, that’s fine” I spoke this time, to the floor.
In bed, he leaned in for a goodnight kiss. Another kiss, that did not end, at a kiss, but instead with my body on top of his. We were making out in this position, and I was convinced that I was finally in control — of my body, of the situation, of my autonomy — because I had again decided with internal authority, that this was both what I wanted, and was as far as it would go — bodies touching over clothes and some kissing, what was the harm in having a do-over if it meant I could erase the strike against his name, and in turn, the previous encounter I’d experienced with him? Incredible isn’t it, what we are able to convince ourselves is power and control when we understand ourselves to be entirely lacking in each of them. My deluded ideas of my having any legitimate agency were short lived though, and before I knew it, he was asking me if he could “please just try and put it in”. In the dark, my half conceived thoughts returned, manifesting as more “uh’s” and “um’s” before I regretfully whispered, “just a little bit.”
It is never not terrifying, in naming the coercion puppy, and so of course, I did not do this. However, whilst I felt that I had betrayed myself in uttering those words, my body maintained the stance that I felt (verbally) I could not — it refused to relinquish itself over to him. “This isn’t happening”, I finally said to him as I rolled back onto my mattress. He laughed before putting his arm around me and saying goodnight, and I lay on my side staring at the small gap of light poking through my blind with my heart drumming in my chest.
It was only a handful of minutes later that I decided I could not sleep next to this man, could not fathom sharing a room with him, my room, let alone share the same bed as him. No longer fawning, I was now frozen despite my best intentions of getting out from underneath him. What would I say if he was awake and registered that I was getting out of bed? Where would I sleep? I lay listening to his breaths as they got heavier before slowly pulling back my quilt. “Where are you going?” he asked me quietly in the dark. “Just suddenly not very tired,” I told him, “I’m gonna make a cup of tea.”
As the kettle boiled, and the familiar panic set in my body, I felt my mind becoming split in two: one half attempting to piece the evening together to understand how I’d come to be in this position, preparing to sleep on my tiny couch without any of my usual luxuries — a blanket and a pillow — whilst the other half was on operation repression. There was no space left to be angry.

Suffice to say I slept terribly, even in my roommate Jess’s bed, where my roommate Chelsea suggested I sleep after she came home later that evening and I gave her a brief, whispered synopsis of the nights’ events in the hallway between our bedrooms. “Don’t go back in there” she told me, looking concerned, “go sleep in Jess’s bed, she’s not coming home tonight.”
In the morning I let myself into my bedroom to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, the bed made, and he fully dressed. “Hi, how are you?” he asked me. “Hi, I’m ok.” I responded, “I freaked out last night.” “Yeah I thought you might’ve,” he told me, “I woke up and you weren’t back and I was like oh my god, what have I done?” “Right,” I said, “so last night, when I told you that I needed to take things slowly, that was my way of saying I didn’t want things to go any further. I’m not good, with intimacy, I find that quite difficult, but I find it even harder to say no,” I explained. “What happens, is I freeze, follow the lead of the person who is, leading, until things happen that I didn’t want to happen.” His face bore no real expression. “I thought you were into it” he offered. “Yeah when we were making out, that was sexy and horny and fun… until it wasn’t. And yes, I am a confident woman, but not within the realm of intimacy.” I asserted. “I’m so sorry” he responded, “I would never want to make you or anyone else feel that way.” “Yep.” I said, “thanks.” “Well, thanks for talking to me about it,” he offered, “I’ll let you get ready for work, but please message me if you want to go for another walk down south, and I’m sorry again.”
He walked out the front door, and a tidal wave of guilt washed over me.

I spent the following forty eight hours dancing between small waves of culpability and indignation before falling flat amongst absolute nothingness. I felt like a human puddle in the process of some kind of dysfunctional precipitation; I’d inch up toward one particular feeling, only to crash and feel entirely two dimensional. I didn’t feel like a person, I felt like a character in a book that I was reading about - I could admire her, I could poke holes in her, but it would not make her real, and it couldn’t bring her experiences that I had observed to life.
I even went as far as to defend him in my initial moment of contrition, explaining to Chelsea the morning after that he “wasn’t a bad guy” he’d just been “enthusiastic” and had “gotten carried away.” I wanted to believe my first impression of him — that he was not a bad or dangerous or entitled man — I wanted to believe that I could still trust myself despite an error in judgement that had left me physically and emotionally hollowed out. I was doing so well. I’d had such a beautiful day at home within myself, I really could not bear the thought that I’d let him take that from me — the day, the efforts I’d made to self-regulate and find joy and pleasure where it didn’t previously exist, the efforts that I had made to heal that were at long last beginning to feel tangible. I didn’t want to have to fathom another traumatic experience with a man, I wasn’t sure where or how it would leave me. How much can one woman take in a single lifetime? In a single decade of her life? But, the more friends that I disclosed the nights’ events to, the further I crept from indignation, and toward steadfast rage.
Admittedly, there was a part of me that still hoped he’d message me, double down on his apologies despite the radio silence, and maybe there’d be a chance; that I could cling to that notion of enthusiasm and in turn, erase the night, clip the rage, continue as I were — peacefully striding forward through my life, entirely unencumbered. But I never heard from him, and as the days passed, my delusional leniency for enthusiasm was curbed by my reality.
My desire to hear from him was not because I was crushing on or besotted by him by the way, it was because I was genuinely willing to sidestep the coercion and lack of consent if it meant I didn’t have to acknowledge it. But as (several) women around me continued to disclose that they’d been there too, their incredibly casual manner with which they spoke told me two things: the first being, that the ways in which we’ve been conditioned since girlhood, to repress our feelings whilst holding space for boys’ emotions and behaviours continues to manifest as men’s entitlement and women being at risk. And the second being, that my previous efforts to tuck myself away neatly and quietly in the corner had not been serving me in the ways that I believed it had.
I would not wear the badge of dishonour that asked, “why didn’t you just say no?”. I would instead, mobilise, in the discourse, right where I belonged.

This was not supposed to be my next chapter, and in a reality where I felt I had agency, or was entitled to any of my feelings of rage or discomfort, none of this was supposed to occur. I didn’t have any interest in dating or making myself palatable for romantic prospects - I did not want to be perceived as potentially pretty, nor sexy, nor having a “really fucking hot pilates body”, nor trying to be anything for that matter. I was quietly and resolutely determined to continue as I had been; existing outside of the confines of the male gaze, of any flavour of yearning, of any version of anger directed at men. I wanted a break from my past that I’ve devoted so much time dissecting both privately and in the public arena. Just for a moment, I didn’t want to be that woman. I didn’t want to be embarrassed, or tired, or pooling all of my mental resources to contribute to the discourse that I had convinced myself I actually had no right to contribute to. Somewhere along the line, I stopped believing that my voice had any real merit. And at that untraceable point in time, I decided that I’d expend my energy elsewhere and instead participate wholly in the present, convinced that it was the only place that I could really thrive from. I’d work, and go to pilates, and meal prep on Sundays, and go to sleep at 9:30pm every night, and manage my endo and ADHD holistically, and attend Yin yoga, and go to the sauna, and make time for my friends, and make more friends, and be the best aunty and sister, and read all the chick-lit books in the zeitgeist, and shower by candle light, and handwrite recipes for my binder, and laugh along to Amy Poehler’s podcast, and refrain from any form of creative expression online in case it were misconstrued as appealing to the male gaze, and I would not feel rage, because I… would be… at peace.
And in a way I kind of was. I’d spent the last twelve months slowly stacking habits that saw me thriving in areas of my life that I’ve typically always struggled in. I’m not trying to take anything that I’ve achieved for granted — I do feel quite proud of the efforts that I’ve made and in turn, the way that facets of my life feel easier to derive joy from, but, as a woman living with chronic illness, I can also understand that this might not last. Additionally, for all of the respect that I have for these practices and for all of the gratitude that I have for myself for integrating them into my life, I cannot help but wonder what the cost of that peace actually was.
Are these merely seasons of life, or is this a gendered phenomenon whereby I must choose between two distinct paths of survival: self-optimised and serene, far removed from both my past and any attempts to dissect men’s atrocious behaviour and modern dating culture, or, verbally outraged and seemingly crazed, at risk of losing the measures I worked so hard to integrate and potentially any real sense of safety within my own body. And why is that my belief system? That in order to be safe in a patriarchal society and within my own world, that I must remain small, quiet, agreeable, and entirely non-controversial?
In the last six months I’ve experienced multiple encounters with men whereby I made very intentional decisions to not be angered by their actions. Water off of a ducks back I’d declared, in turn convincing myself that it was genuinely in my best interest not to write about, or think about or dissect any of their behaviours in a way that I could not later come back or remove myself from. From the man I was dating earlier in the year, whose measures and gestures told me it was safe to lean in and meet him where he was, only for him to leap right back with something that felt like a really awful combination of confusion and pity when I travelled the short distance to him. To a friend’s partner’s brother, who I’d met only twice who believed it was entirely appropriate to suggest I send explicit photos to him via Instagram, as though I could not recognise the merit in my physicality without having heard it from him first. To the unidentifiable man who, unbeknownst to me until very recently, has been harassing me online for the past 18 months, stewing in my message requests, attacking virtually every facet of my character, my appearance, my physique, my work, and anything and everything that I shared online. (A terrifying discovery that left me shaking in my kitchen because how was on earth was I supposed to ascertain this man’s geographical and relational proximity to me?) To an older man who just a fortnight ago at a family-friendly winter solstice street party, approached me whilst I was taking a photo of a dog, and asked, “how about me?” with a repulsive grin spread over his face that was far too close to my own. To this current chapter, with a thirty-two year old man who couldn’t seem to wrap his head around consent — the literal bare minimum that we expect from people that we’re even considering being intimate with — or acknowledge that I did not want things to progress with him.
The thing that feels like the biggest kick in the teeth, is that for the duration of the last year, whilst I buried my head in the sand and habit stacked until the cows came home, is that it didn’t make an ounce of difference to how men were responding to me simply existing as a woman experiencing contentment and trying to quietly express largely nothing but.
Two days before the surfer picked me up to drive to the mechanic, I had a dream about him. One that should have been heeded for the warning that I believe it was. In the dream, we’d slept together, and as I wandered around a bedroom that was not mine, he uttered ever so casually that he wasn’t interested in anything more with me. In response, I screamed from the bottom of my belly, “I’M SO FUCKING TIRED OF THIS.” And then I woke up. Short, sharp, not so shiny, my intuition has never failed me, so why didn’t I listen? Because I really believed, that I was safe, with my head in the sand, with the totality of my being not sharply pointed at a group of people who have done nothing but take from me. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I don’t get to exist how I please, in any season or version of life, without facing repercussions that I couldn’t be less responsible for no matter what attitude or practice I adopt.
In the four weeks since having the surfer over, I have withdrawn from the people closest to me, I’ve consumed too much wine in an effort to detach from myself, I’ve experienced crippling anxiety that has both kept and pulled me from sleep, I’ve endured my worst bout of PMDD in months, seeing immense fatigue, self-loathing and low moods determine my days, I’ve bled on and off for the entire duration of the month because my nervous system is in havoc, and I’ve been hyper-focused on presenting as completely fine in all of the arenas that I might take up space in (public, private, work).
But what dare I ask, might be the fallout or repercussions that the surfer might face as a direct result of his own actions? Momentary guilt, shame, a fleeting touch of remorse, anxiety over whether or not I would write about this experience? Which is rich considering he joked on our beach walk, “don’t write about me!” to which I responded, half joking, “don’t do anything to warrant me writing about you!”
If he chooses to, he could take this as the opportunity that (for him) it is and could strive towards bettering himself. Work through the extreme discomfort I’m sure he’ll experience if he reads this. And maybe he’ll never try to coerce another woman again. Maybe next time he’ll listen and respond accordingly — as a grown man who understands the basic tenets of consent.
But, however he chooses to respond, it is impossible to ignore the stark distinction between what I am forced to work through and carry, and what he has the privilege of deciding is either a confronting opportunity for growth or merely an inconvenience he has the luxury of ignoring. A luxury that I myself, will never be afforded. What a cruel and gendered domino effect.

To believe that I had nothing to contribute to the discourse, that the previous version of myself couldn’t wholly serve me, or that I could actually sustain a life unencumbered by a man’s default programming, was nothing more than a misguided lapse in my judgement in an effort to keep myself safe. This is not to say that had I not let my head slip into the self-optimised clouds as a measure of survival, that this would not have occurred. No matter what literature I was absorbing, or how much or how frequently I was or was not contributing to the dialogue, as long as I had invited him into my home, this was almost always going to happen. And it’s not about my being smart or assertive or careful, it never was. It was always about him and his priority of his own pleasure agenda at the risk of my personhood and sense of safety.
So, until modern dating culture as it stands stops feeling inclined to accept that things such as inviting a man over for a bowl of pasta is a green light for casual intimacy, or that a kiss is permission to physically refute a person’s boundaries, I will continue to fight tooth and nail, and I will continue to take up as much space within this realm as I please.
And that, is my agenda — not one of pleasure, but of necessity.

I was too young. that’s what everybody told me. doctors and my mother and my friends who stopped speaking to me. the man I loved coaxing me away from my damp pillow every morning. but he was too young. to be mustering momentum and searching for a will. my will. to get up and to live and, you have so much to live for. that’s what everybody said. but I didn’t want it, didn’t ask for it. to get up and live. take me back, I’d beg the skies. pretend I was never here. pinch my eyes closed and find my will. to close the curtains, to blow out the candle, to snap my fingers for a semblance of peace. quiet. where thoughts didn’t stop ruminating, they ceased to exist. to will, to will, to will. myself out of existence. to be a still life force. come back as something that breathes but does not speak. that moves but cannot think. I was too young.

I was too smart. my whole life ahead of me. caught between precipices. of adolescence and a future. of growing and shrinking. you can be anything you want to be. that’s what everybody said. but all I wanted was to be a master. of myself. of pain. point to someone with resolve and say, that. please. I want to be known, but not like this. please. a master of pain while you’re at it. please.

I think I was born with it. inherited it from my mother. absorbed it in the womb and was birthed with it. should’ve known to eat it. swallow it. spit it out and leave it all inside of her. but I was too smart. brought it to the surface with my first breath. had to conquer it. tame it. soothe it. smart enough to know I had to live alongside it. smart enough to understand that to live with it meant to live without her.

I was courageous. that’s what I tell myself now. whispered into ears and discovered the art. of conversation and writing and cathartic crying. of loving and losing. of laughing and laughing and laughing again. of slipping and clawing back, back, back. hold my nephews’ tiny hands. wear the title of godmother. watch my friends fall in love. write. write. write. to think I could have missed this. to think I tried to stop it in its tracks. life. my life. to think I didn’t want it. to know sometimes I won’t. a friend told me recently, I think you find comfort in the misery. and I wanted to s c r e a m. to take her shoulders and shake them just to remind her that I am still here. and maybe she’s right. about comfort. how do you make peace with your demons? how do you grieve a mother still breathing? too young. too smart. I see her even when I am not looking for her. find her in the misery. remember why I stayed in the first place.

I don’t know when I wrote this. I found it saved in a random word doc. but my best guess is at least two years ago.
It makes me cry, reading this. Happy/sad tears. Gratitude mixed with a really profound heartache for the sheer volume of pain that permeated my experiences as a young girl and a young woman. The countless years of my early adulthood that were stamped with an incessant and insufferable depression and a loneliness so extreme, I was reduced to suicidal ideation on several occasions. There were so many moments where I thought I wouldn’t make it - there were so many times that I didn’t want to. The only common through line is that on every occasion that I was unable to find or was looking a reason to stay, I was yearning deeply for a mother who did not exist. I was yearning to be loved, and seen, and recognised. I was yearning just to be known.
So strong was my desire to pull the curtains shut, to blow out the candle, because what I was desperately and quietly longing for, was to… just start again. To re-emerge from the womb of another woman, another mother; to experience a relationship free from the undercurrent of fear, and confusion, and inconsistency. To know who I was because the woman who gave me life could tell me. The proof of my existence and my personhood rolling off of her tongue back toward me safely, gently.

So much of my upbringing has to answer for those years spent in relentless turmoil. So many of the fingers on both of my hands point toward my mother for her sheer ability to deny me of my feelings as a child, lest my pain take away from her own. Some point toward my father too, but they retreat inwards when I consider his MS diagnosis. How do you navigate a disease you understand could strip you of your life when the woman you love will barely look at you? How do you continue living the live you formerly knew? Objectively, I can understand why he had so little time for us, his daughters, but we were still robbed of stability, of parents, of a blueprint for love that wasn’t faulty.

All that I longed for throughout my teenage years and my twenties, was to be loved. Was to know a mother’s love, specifically my mother’s love. And I spent a devastating number of years holding my breath waiting for it to arrive, unencumbered from conditions. I tried looking for it elsewhere. In other people’s mothers, in romantic relationships and with men who didn’t respect me. I didn’t have the full capacity or bandwidth to pursue ‘normal’ or ‘regular’ life endeavours for a woman of my age - I was too consumed with this overbearing deficit of love. Of finding it, and filling it (or destroying my life in the event that I’d failed to locate it). The beginning of the rest of my life was contingent on it. Can you imagine what that does to a person? Sometimes I thought I would go mad. Sometimes I think I did.
When you’re that desperate to give and receive love throughout the formative years that are shaping your identity, it disfigures you internally, leaving gaping punctures where there shouldn’t be. You don’t grow in the same direction as the people around you, nor can you thrive in the same conditions that they do - you don’t have access to the same variables.
I always felt like I was walking around on fire, writhing in pain, wondering how it was possible for nobody else to feel the heat coming off of my body. Wondering how nobody could hear the blood curdling screams that reverberated within me and around me at all times. I was just so angry. And I was perpetually heartbroken - that there was so much sadness in me that I’d inherited; that I had to learn how to eradicate it from my mind alone. It didn’t seem fair to have a genetic predisposition to this nature, to this profound sadness and to be without a maternal figure to help me through it. There were countless occasions where I wondered what I must have done in a past life, to be born so sensitive, to a mother with so much pain, who could not perceive my own emotions as anything but a threat. She wanted me to feel nothing and I felt everything. I still do.

I’ve spent the last twelve or so months with an increasingly clinical perspective on our former relationship. As though it wasn’t her, me, us. As though the memories belong to someone else and I never had a mother. As though I woke up one day and was simply here, breathing and alone.
I think in this current season of my life I’ve grown slightly detached from it all in a way I haven’t encountered previously - the misery and the grief and the trying to claw my way back to the past as a means for finding several versions of myself whose identity was contingent on suffering. It wasn’t that I wanted to suffer year after year, it was that I wanted to understand, to remember. I thought that if I kept digging, I could submerge my hand back into the past and reach my younger self before it was too late.
Perhaps she found me instead. Reached for me in my sleep and drew a line in the sand, urged me to stop looking back. You won’t find yourself there, I imagine her saying. Perhaps I listened. Perhaps this won’t last.
So this mother’s day, I will not cry for her, I will not grieve the life I could have had, nor the woman I may have become had I been known. I will not sit idle in the past waiting for ghosts to greet me - they will not be the axis that I orbit in a familiar hunt for pain.
I will sit, instead, as I am now, with the totality of myself. I will think of my sister, and how she is the mother we never had, but were always desperate to touch and have and know. I will think of my nephews; how kind and gentle and curious they are allowed to be. How lucky they are to have the right blueprints to love, and how deeply grateful I am to be a constant in those blueprints - to learn to love by loving them.
And then, I’ll light a candle, eat a delicious meal, read a beautiful passage and recognise the greater sum of my parts, who exist and chose to stay in spite of her.

Once a vulnerable girl by circumstance, I am now a vulnerable woman by choice - do you understand what it takes to become this gentle?

“What the heck” he responded, laughing in disbelief. “I always get pulled over. Cops take one look at me and wave me right in at every RBT.” “Maybe you need to start driving in strictly formalwear” I suggested. “No, it’s the hair” he said, “ But you know why that happened though, don’t you?” He said, referring to the policeman who pushed the tissue box toward me as I cried, tipsy in the cop shop, and the judge, and the other cop who gave me a week to gather the evidence to prove my license was in fact, legitimate and not disqualified. “Yeah, yeah, yeaaaah,” I said, indulging him while I batted my hand at the air, “pretty privilege.” “Pretty privilege” he affirmed.

It’s not that I didn’t agree with him. Of course I do, given that historically, thin, white women vs. the law tends to bring with it a certain light-handed touch that others aren’t privy to, it would be remiss of me to deny this almost irrefutable rule. I’m just not so sure that this same rule applies to me anymore. I’ve stopped looking in mirrors for longer than is necessary, because I don’t particularly love what I see looking back at me.

It’s not that I believe I’m some kind of hideous, scary troll lady, who belongs under a bridge and only speaks in jumbled profanities because she’s misunderstood, and, she wasn’t always like this. It’s simply that I don’t fit the brief anymore. I don’t cut the mustard. Don’t belong on a milk carton if I were to go missing (if this were forty years ago). I’m not even sure what picture they would use of me in this hypothetical time travel scenario, because I don’t know how to take them anymore.

By the way, this isn’t a world’s smallest violin moment. I’m not crying into my pillow or losing sleep because I don’t think I’m pretty the way that I used to believe I was pretty. It’s more of a quiet self-acceptance that’s occurred over time slowly, like a creature in the night, born from a lack of validation. I stopped participating, and knowingly removed it from my orbit. I pulled my hat out of the ring to see how it would feel, and it felt… quiet. It still feels quiet.

It’s as though with every small step I took away from indulging in myself, from being chronically online, from learning the eyebrows of that particular year, from staying in the know and having that be a very loud verbal act in and of itself, I was unknowingly stripping away tiny fragments of my identity. The one that I’ve since convinced myself was contrite and self-serving and vain. (great wardrobe though, can we get that back?) I’m not sure this is necessarily true as a strict binary, that I was all of these things and nothing else, but I certainly was all of these things. I was twenty years old. And then some.

I used to be a young woman who understood some things to be true:

1. I was pretty

2. I was cool

3. I was really, very in the know

Now I am a woman who understands these things to be very true:

1. I am smart

2. I am kind

3. I am insecure most days at best

The aforementioned man, the one that I was recently dating told me I was so beautiful on our first date, and I fell into such a state of disbelief, I blew a small snot bubble out of my nose just trying to exhale through the compliment. I wasn’t uncomfortable because of the compliment, I was uncomfortable because I didn’t believe him, and what a brazen act to tell an almost stranger they’re so beautiful when they could in fact be, a horrible, terrible, no good person who maybe actually does belong under a bridge speaking strictly in profanities.

Sometimes (often) I wonder how it would feel if I were to indulge again. If I indulged in botox again, if I became the kind of woman who bleached her asshole and had regular laser hair removal sessions and regular haircuts. If I was the kind of woman who got her nails done and booked herself in to get her eyebrows done instead of relying on her sister to do them for free without notice every three months. If I was the kind of woman who frequently took pictures of herself and felt comfortable being seen, looking at herself, the kind of woman who put her hat back in the ring. Is this what it would take? Could I then accept a compliment? Believe that I’m beautiful enough for a stranger on a first date? Look into a mirror and think something other than, ‘this is a fine, very normal, regular face for a fine, very normal, regular woman.’

It makes me wonder about all of my coupled friends, naturally. I deliberate how it must feel to have a person kiss you on the mouth and tell you that you’re beautiful. How it must feel to believe that, to have access to that. How that person would know exactly what photo to put on the milk carton, because they probably took it themselves.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is something to the nature of, if a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If I exist where I choose to exist, and nobody is around to bear witness to it or kiss me on the mouth and love me, where am I?

I am right here. Halfway between these words and the real world. The one that I deliberate on. The one that I do not entirely know how to be a part of because I took my hat out of the ring. Because I cannot determine if there is nothing, or everything to gain, if I were to put it back in.

I think my friends think I’m being unreasonable. And I think I am too, to a degree.
“You’re a lover” Kelly has told me over and again. Not as though it’s a character flaw or something to change or be reprimanded for, she says it to me with as much conviction as vicarious pain. She looks at me, and she knows.

“I have so much love to give” I cried to you in bed the last night we spent together, “and no where to put it.”
I wasn’t waiting for you to point to your heart and say, here, here, here. I just needed to get it off my chest, my own heart, to put it somewhere it could exist outside of myself.

Do you remember when you stayed at mine the night before your flight back home for the holidays? You ran late and I thought you weren’t coming. Suitcase and backpack in tow at my front door, I was mildly cold toward you and I watched you momentarily shrink. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were like the others.
In the morning you pulled a brown paper bag out of your backpack that had a hardcover book inside of it. “Merry Christmas” you said to me so shyly, so sincerely. You put your hand in the paper bag and pulled out a piece of paper folded in four, “there’s a card too… it’s why I ran late last night.” I unfurled the paper out of the bag and saw a drawing of my face on the front.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were like the others.
I tried to read it in front of you and you wouldn’t let me. Your Uber arrived and after you left I read it at least six times like a giddy child who had just received a letter from Santa, marvelling at the shonky drawing that I knew you’d done by memory because we hadn’t bothered with social media. You don’t participate, and I’ve taken a step back to reassess my relationship with being perpetually online.
I didn’t tell you this, but I took a picture of what you wrote inside the piece of paper folded in four. I think I’ve memorised your handwriting now.

“You’re a lover.”

Do you remember what you said to me that same night before you left as I lay on my back on my bed and you looked at me as though you loved me? “Don’t forget about me" You said as you kissed me. “You?” I said with comedic absurdity. “Absolutely not.” And I meant it.

When you were away I got drunk on Christmas and told my sisters and my cousin about you. “I really think I’m going to love him.” I gushed, and then proceeded to recount all of the ways that you were real in an effort to make it fact by saying it out loud. Irrefutable, I convinced myself. I put the paper hat on my head that fell out of the bon-bon and thought I was safe.

14/12/25

It is at once, a thing, an act, a doing, a becoming. That I want to keep private. Swimming through my memories of the morning that just was. The night that came and went. Compiling my favourite memories and revisiting them over and again the way one does after discovering a song that scratches an itch. Maybe one you didn’t even know you had.
In the same breath, I want to take these moments, the memories, that which lives in my mind, and give it over to others. Like a child at the beach who stumbles across a shell. Theirs to keep, theirs to show, theirs to be beholden to.
I want to be witnessed as an enamoured woman. To have this moment recognised for what I think it is. A beginning.

16/12/25

How strange and foreign a feeling this is. To understand, to know that I will love him before I really even know him. It all feels very adult, in the way that it has timed out. Career and then love. It just feels so natural, this order of things. As though everything that has come before makes a different kind of sense to me now. Every hurt and mistake and lesson, and every person that came before and all of the ways that they changed me. I thought I had grown cool and coy and absent. But I can see now. I am warm and soft and loveable. I am capable of love.

When you came back home and I picked you up from the airport, I felt the same sense of anticipation, excitement, and unnatural calm that I came to expect when your presence was nearing. You lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around you as we kissed and I felt like I was in a real life rom-com. My Andie Anderson moment come to fruition despite none of the circumstances being paralleled in the slightest. Moments later you threw up in my car in a paper bag from food poisoning and I batted the cops away before they could tell me I was illegally parked. I was disappointed because I’d bought new lingerie for you and I knew you were too sick to see it, let alone appreciate it. But you tried.
I messaged you when I got home, littered it with ‘I’m sorry you’re unwell’s’ and ‘I hope you feel better soon’s’ and ‘xxx’s’ and you didn’t respond until the next day, no kisses in sight.

The next day I drove to Moonta with a pit in my stomach that I tried to ignore. Slept in the same bed that my ex and I had shared the last time I was there and remembered that it was the same room he’d told me he loved me in. “You love me?” I had asked with disbelief, wiping the remnants of coke and snot from my nose, unsure of what to do with my hands or his gesture that I didn’t believe. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew he was mistaken. Not because it was me, but because he hadn’t seen me. I thought of you and fell into a deep sleep, sending smoke signals with my mind, reaching you through the ether that felt safe again by the evening.

When I came back home from Moonta three days later, you met me at my door twenty minutes after my arrival. My hair still half wet after an accelerated everything shower, no make up on. I confessed that I needed to abandon our plans for a drive because I’d just driven for three hours and passed a hearse, a cemetery when I stopped for a road-side wee, followed by a number plate that ended in 711, causing my brain to end the self-imposed rhyme with ‘going to heaven.’ I imagined myself on the precipice of love suddenly dying before I’d had it and didn’t want to take any chances. I asked if we could stay in and watch Stranger Things and you happily obliged.
You’d bought gummy bears for the drive and days later when I was crying in bed from endo I hinted that I wanted the gummy bears, that I wanted you. You shook me off like the beginning of a cold and I wished I’d never made the plans that I abandoned.

I felt you leave before you had. In my bones, in the pit of my stomach, in my subconscious mind that spoke over the memories of you telling me that I was beautiful, in mind, in body, in soul, your palm pressed firmly against my chest, your eyes unwavering from my own. Over every memory of you being transparent and open and loving and sincere. Over every memory of you kissing my entire face and body, professing your thoughts and feelings to me repeatedly because I hadn’t heard you the first time. I thought it was kismet, I thought it was my time.

What if I’d kept my mouth shut? Not divulged that I was beginning to feel anxious and scared to be honest and real in case it were perceived as being too intense the way you told me that I had been, in case I were to be perceived as being too much? Would you be here beside me tonight, your palm pressed against my chest, your fingers tracing my back, would you tell me that I was beautiful? That you’d never felt like this? What if I had abandoned myself, refrained myself from saying, “we don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.” Would you be here? Would you love me?

Now my TikTok algorithm is a self-perpetuating feed of tarot readers and pseudo psychs telling anyone that will listen (me) that you’re going to reach out, that you’re so afraid of the connection that you ran from it, that you will warp the narrative in order for it so suit your own despite the falsehood it exists in. That you are too hurt, too scared of love. The very reason, I believe, that we are here at all.

I keep waiting for you to come back. I want to tell you about the bird I ran over two days after proudly declaring to you that I had never previously maimed or killed one accidentally. I want to tell you about re-meeting an unknowing colleague of yours on the weekend a year later in a different state, and how strange it was considering neither of you are from Adelaide and I’d met her in Townsville. I want to tell you about the women at work who nurtured me the morning after we ended things when I cried at my desk, how they convinced me that it wasn’t simply the connection, but that I was the connection. A life force of sorts, cultivating and sustaining things because I am a lover.

Tonight my roommates found me outside again, in my waiting position, for you to come back. I confessed that TikTok had convinced me you were avoidant and hurting, and despite how ridiculous I sounded they emerged moments later with a book, ‘Attached.’ I took it from them and laughed whilst telling them it will now be my bible.

I am not embarrassed to admit that I think I almost loved you. I am not embarrassed by any measure to be a lover. All I ask is that you please don’t change the story.

It’s Sunday morning.
“Good morning chooky” I sing out to Zahra as I enter her room. “I’m going for a walk! Do you want to come?” she asks.
I roll into bike shorts that I really should wash and we make our way to her car. Fast strides and slow breaths. It’s the first time that we’ve gone for a walk together and she hasn’t told me I ‘can walk really quick for a girl with such little legs!”. I smile to myself as I realise.
We grab a takeaway coffee (her treat) on our way back and the sun (having moved beyond the reach of the clouds) is kissing my back that now feels slightly damp from our pace.
Back home and I clean my room, put my clothes away, arrange my birthday cards on my dresser. I lay on top of my bed and look at the photos on my digital camera. Laugh so loud I know the neighbours can hear me because my fly screen door is still open. Chandler messages and asks if I want to go to the Japanese garden. Says she’ll bring watermelon. I wear my $7 op shop boots and pack cupcakes.
“Seven, seven, seven!” “three, three, three!” we shout. There are angel numbers everywhere. We stop for a coffee. The owner asks where I’ve been. “Took off to Townsville for a beat” I tell him. “that’ll be $87” he jokes to Chandler as she pays. Says it was nice to see us as we head back to the car, coffees in hands.
Drink bottles, bags, car keys, cupcakes, sliced watermelon in a big bowl, a picnic rug, iced lattes, books, journals. It is perhaps the greatest juggling act that the Japanese garden has ever seen. Roll out the rug. The sun decided on a permanent position. My shoulders warm after I take off my cardigan. We sit facing each other, say everything. Life. It’s always about life. (It almost always should be). Decide on a book break only to feel a tap on my shoulder five minutes later. “I have two songs to show you” she says. Grab the headphone labelled ‘R’. Two long songs. We turn our heads to face each other and laugh intermittently throughout the first. “It was written in the 80’s” she tells me. The second is peaceful, a meditation of sorts. A stranger sneezes obnoxiously in the park and we break out in laughter again. Sit back up. The sun has moved again. Resume our conversation. Love. It is always about love. (It almost always should be). “Are you ready to go?” I ask, “I’m about to wet myself”. Gather the belongings and head back to the car. A pitstop at a public toilet in a neighbouring park. Slide the empty bowl from my lap. “Eight, eight, eight!”, “four, four, four!” we yell in unison. Mystified because how could there be so many in such a small window of time.
Back up the stairs, the door is unlocked. Fetch a container of pad thai I ordered on Friday night and a slice of birthday cake in a sandwich bag for her. “Thank you for today” I tell her. “Thank you for today” she repeats with inflection.
Shut the door behind her and grab my journal. Speaker on, incense lit. I write this all down. Stare at my taco ingredients I purchased before my beach walk with Zahra. I’ll make dinner later.

What is the difference between a hungry man, and a starving woman?
only one turns into a monster.

I can still remember the first time I saw him, is that strange to admit? I was twenty-three and working in a cocktail bar by the beach with seasonal patronage. Summers meant tightly packed bodies and repetitious airs of steam from the dishwasher and excessive shaking of tins over and again. Evenings would pass by at lightning speed – the only obvious marker of time moving was the sky’s substitution of the sun for the stars. They say blink and you’ll miss it, and we so often did. Making up for the feeling of having lost time, I’d often find myself loitering in the bar past closing with my colleagues, remnants of wine being passed between us as we expressed the same sentiment from the night before: “that was fucked”.
It was during one of these post-work midnight exchanges that I first encountered him. He worked in the restaurant downstairs with the chef as a server, but given my relatively new employment status, I hadn’t yet met him, let alone decidedly put him on my radar. What is it that Joan Didion said? Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it changes. When I think back to that moment, I fail to recall conversation between us as we sat amongst the small group in the closed bar. Instead, I remember his white linen shirt, how it looked slightly snug on his six-foot four frame. I remember his curly, loose tendrils, how he would occasionally push them back off of his face as he spoke. And I remember his smile – I remember driving home that night thinking about his crooked teeth and how I really didn’t mind them. That was the night that a small seed was planted, by way of the universe, or by way of myself – I still can’t really answer that. Had I not forced the hand, perhaps there would be no story at all, and without the story, perhaps there would be no cosmic lessons.

It didn’t take long for a friendship, or something relative to friendship to be instigated between us. Lunch breaks acted as a soft launch pad, but the midnight coups when he was present begun to act as an adhesive between us. I’d often find myself sat beside him or across from him on these evenings, as though there was something drawing me toward him that was impossible to resist. Maybe it was as simple as a lack of self-restraint, a foreboding crush that I couldn’t quite admit to myself out of a small fear that I would later be rejected. He was seven years my senior, twice my size in stature, and carried himself with an undeniable air of confidence. It was difficult not to be enamoured, but it felt safer to dance on the edges, pocketing the moments of shared glances and flirtatious jabs only to further inspect them later in the privacy of my room. Spreading the previous instants out in my head like a tiny mirage where my memories could offer evidence that he felt something too. Despite how it may seem, I’ve always found it difficult to take a leap of faith without the assurance of knowing that someone will meet me at the bottom. But faith isn’t contingent on assurance – I have almost always largely acted on proof.

A small handful of weeks passed, and we continued to develop our friendship in the comfort of our respective venues, often exchanging conversation in the company of our colleagues. We were seldom alone, but the lack of privacy did little to mitigate the feelings of tension that were developing. Gazes were held a fraction too long, thighs were brushed up against under tables in the dark, and wherever I moved in the bar, I could feel his eyes following me. It was these small seemingly inconsequential gestures that sent jolts of electricity through my body. I didn’t see the harm in my acts of appearing available to him, in leaning into the playful game of cat and mouse that we had knowingly and quietly begun participating in. It was not for an inferior lack of foresight, but because there was nothing that hinted toward her existence – until he turned up in the bar during lunch with an unfamiliar redhead by his side. He introduced her to me as his girlfriend and I shook her hand as if pretending she wasn’t real might make it suddenly true. Where had she appeared from, and why were there no whispers of her presence from the mouths of him or anybody else? I questioned our mutual colleagues in an effort to yield insight, but their half-formed impressions of his indifference toward the relationship offered little more than two certainties: their relationship was long-distance, and he appeared completely unattached.
A week later she had returned home to Melbourne and the former nature of our relationship quickly resumed. Our work venues feeling like insular playgrounds in that we were free to roam one another’s territories and indulge in behaviour we knew was inappropriate, but we hadn’t yet crossed a physical boundary. Until I had one too many post-work drinks and grew anxious at the prospect of my forty-five-minute commute home. I asked to stay at his and he offered to make me up a bed on his couch, but I never made it into the living room.
In the morning, I’d expected to wake in his bed in a sea of shame, reprimanding myself for willingly becoming what I’d always vowed to never be: the other woman. I wanted to want to wipe my hands clean, to reserve what dignity I had left, but I couldn’t let it alone. Too consumed by both my unrelenting crush, and a deluded mentality that whatever the cause of his unattached nature, I could fix it. We had coffee and eggs for breakfast, and it became alarmingly easy to blur the edges of her from my mind, to resolutely decide that she simply did not exist because he wouldn’t acknowledge their relationship.
I sought the council of those close to me for advice on how to proceed, waiting to be admonished, to be at the mercy of that which was swarming in my head that I was quickly supressing – to be told that I was behaving like a bad person! and more importantly, a bad woman! But no such thing occurred, instead a similar warning prevailed amongst my friends, with the diligent sentiment of ‘be careful Tori’ echoing time and time again. It grew difficult to chastise myself for confusing my personal ethics when with each person I divulged the truth to, nobody slapped me on the wrist. Why were my bad deeds continuing to go unpunished? Was I a masochist, or was I simply juvenile?
And so continued our torrid affair. We began to spend countless nights together, relinquishing ourselves to each other over again in consistent moments of weakness. It didn’t help that we worked closely together, that we lived approximately 900m away from one another (proximity has often acted as a form of smoke and mirrors for me when it comes to men). If he would call, I would answer. If I were to text, he would be at my house within minutes. Was it purely about sex? If you were a fly on the wall watching clothes snatched hungrily from bodies, it would be easy to assume, yes. And I think it was, at least in the beginning; ours was an intense sexual chemistry, one that I can admit I haven’t experienced since.

As the weeks passed, I found myself worshipping the very ground that he walked on. The way he laid out the table for breakfast with quiet intention, the antique hanger in his room holding tomorrow’s white linen shirt, his effortless taste for refinement without overindulging – all of it drew me in because I understood that none of it was meant for me. My trained eye was looking for clues, a tell-tale sign of a character drenched in infidelity, a person I could poke holes in, but all I saw was a man: seven years my senior, twice my size in stature, with crooked teeth that I really didn’t mind.
Suddenly, I blinked, and I had missed it, the chance to stop it before it went too far, the moment where I came to my senses and leapt in backward strides away from him. Months had disappeared in the space we had created, and our dynamic had inherently shifted. I was in it – so far in, I was drowning in him, in us. Neck-deep in the mess, surpassing the precipice of casual and falling blindly into the place of no return. What began as a hungry, reckless error in both judgement and morality had twisted into something heavier, something real. As though he’d crawled under my skin and had decided to stay, to undo me.
We continued like this for some time. Late night finishes at work followed by quick phone calls and headlights in driveways. Living rooms and bedrooms that turned into private sanctuaries where she didn’t exist. Evenings trickled into the early hours of the morning and with each passing hour I would not think about her. I was there. On his couch, in his sheets, my hands finding his chest, my head searching for his shoulder. I was there. At the table for breakfast, my hands wrapped around his mug, my audible footsteps in his kitchen. As long as I was there, she did not exist.
After three months together, I’d stopped searching for signs. He didn’t love her – the question that had previously sat idle on my tongue finally emerged as a whisper one evening on the couch. Relief washed over my body. I didn’t ask when he would end it, despite his response I couldn’t find the courage. I clung to his answer as proof, of us, of our future, of a love within reach.
I don’t remember the exact timeline, maybe it was days, or weeks from that moment, but I remember the self-inflicted whiplash. The fantasy rug that I’d permitted myself to create being ripped out from underneath me. “She’s moving to Adelaide in three months” he said one morning after breakfast. I thought I was going to be sick.
“How? When? Why?” in my desperate need to understand I had found my source of courage I’d failed to summon earlier. “For work” he said – a lie. I gathered my belongings and drove home knowing that the distance would not last.
I didn’t immediately ask when he would end it. The question hung unspoken, but unnecessary. We both understood: her arrival marked the beginning of my disappearing. She would be there – borrowing hours from tomorrow in his living room, his bed, her footsteps echoing through his kitchen – whilst I sat 900m away, knowing he did not love her. If she was there, I did not exist.
It didn’t last long, avoiding the question I knew he couldn’t answer. And as the weeks continued to move at an uncomfortable speed, I began to take on a new shape with every meek “I don’t know” he uttered back at me.
I began losing sleep. A relentless rhetoric that ricocheted through my mind bouncing from, this isn’t fair, to, this is on me night after night. But there was no gun to my head, no weight of an ultimatum hanging heavily from my body. I knew leaving was an option, I just wouldn’t take it. My future was subject to the promise land that he’d never promised.
But time was of the essence; three months had dwindled to one and it felt like we were playing the adult version of tug of war with each other. The push and pull, the give and take, the dance couples do when they fail to find the words. We fought like one, fucked like one, made up like one. He would pour oil from a jar of goat cheese into the avocado I’d smashed, and I would say, “but I don’t like goat cheese”, and he would say “you can’t even taste it” and I would say, “yes I can, now I can’t eat this”. But when all was said and done, we weren’t a couple – we were two people suffocating in a mess at our own hands because we were terrified to be honest, to be alone. I would ice him out just as quickly as I would yearn for him, going days without speaking after more demands of when, only to slip back into him when he responded soon. But the clock was ticking and I was conjuring an image of a faceless woman with red hair and packing boxes. I hated him. I wanted to scream and spit and threaten him until I did. I hated myself. In the days leading up to her arrival I went to work early and pointed, sniffing him out like a hunting dog until I found him on a bench outside. “If you don’t tell her before she gets here, you better believe that I will. Do not make me this person, this is not who I am”. But I wouldn’t tell her. I was not after all, that kind of person.
After that moment we had mutually drawn a line in the sand between one another. I wanted nothing to do with him until I had proof of finality, whilst he was making a last-ditch effort at attempting to have any moral footing, as though our previous months together could be swiftly swept from his conscience in a matter of days.
The following week he drove to Melbourne to pick her up. They took the Great Ocean Road back to Adelaide. “It’s a beautiful drive”, he messaged me. I don’t know why he told me that. I remembered then, my sister telling me years prior about her own drive along the Great Ocean Road with her now husband, how they’d fucked up against the car and I wondered if he had done the same with her. I imagined him bending her over the bonnet, her red hair blowing wildly in the wind that I’d conjured in my tortured imagination.

The four days that it took for them to complete the trip saw me become completely untethered. Had he told her? Had they made it back? Would she see the move through if she knew? I couldn’t think about anything else. I picked my phone up as quickly and as frequently as I slammed it back down on my bed. Hiding it under my pillow as though if I pretended that I didn’t care, the universe would soon reward me with any version of a response. I felt like a child who leaves their bedroom only to run back in seconds later attempting to catch their favourite stuffed toy in a different position. I was growing small and unbecoming, and time had become tortuous and unmoving as I spiralled in my room waiting for a message that I wasn’t sure was going to appear.
Despite all doubt, it arrived two days later. It was the morning of his 30^th birthday. “It’s done” he said. “What happened?” I asked, I couldn’t help myself. “I couldn’t get hard for her. She knew something was wrong. I told her everything”. “I’m here whenever you need me” I responded as though I was nothing more than an innocent bystander.

It’s a bizarre concept, to comfort a man you’re denying to yourself that you love as he processes the tumult of his actions involving another woman. But over the months he had become my closest friend and confidante, and so that’s what I did. I offered space where I felt it should have been given, and myself in the moments where I suspected the contrary. I was willingly operating as a human feeding board – sex, support, conversation – take what you want as you please. Waiting again with bated breath for him to tell me everything I’d been waiting to hear; I choose you, I see you, I love you. But my optimism was characteristically flawed, and instead he told me he couldn’t be in a relationship (yet).
It became another round of tug of war, of pushing and pulling, of trying to stay away from each other and failing miserably at it. I’d been operating as his faux girlfriend for six months and it was easy then, at twenty-three, to convince myself that I could sacrifice more of my time for the prospect of a future that I was perpetually uncertain of. And so, I leant once more into the breakfasts and long mornings, the charged energy that never dissipated, the conversations that stretched into the early hours. Because I believed that we could make it.
Several more months passed like this. Together, but apart. Intrinsically linked but with an undeniable degree of separation that was his commitment to me. It wasn’t a secret, it never was. Our lives were tethered by means of lust, weak attempts at romance, and the hospitality industry. Our colleagues would look at me with pity and tell me I deserved more, and I would say nothing, because how could they possibly understand? That despite everything I was falling for him, that ours was a connection that I hadn’t come close to since I was nineteen. He sees me, I wanted to wail at them as I shook their shoulders until they recognised in me the severity of my longing. I disregarded their concerns and continued to hedge my bets on time; believing that it would be the aid that would facilitate our union, that it was all merely a test of patience, of faith, of perseverance. Just a fraction longer I would repeatedly tell myself as I made the two-minute commute to his house from my own. Until an intuitive knowing forced my hand.
I remember it in fragments. The pit in my stomach that I couldn’t locate a source for, the subsequent and internal questioning of what he’d said, and how he’d said it without having any legitimate reason to be suspicious. Was something amiss, or had I finally hit the impending constraint of my patience? My gut was sounding the familiar alarm bells, and in his bathroom, I finally listened. “Are you okay in there?” he called out to me from the living room, my eyes glued to his phone sitting on the basin playing music. “Yep. All good, be out in a minute” I responded, my heart drumming in my chest, my gaze unmoving. I knew before I really knew, before I had tangible proof, because my body told me so. Because just days before at work, I’d witnessed a shared glance that I recognised, but had just as quickly put it to bed. Denial is a fickle thing, but the body never lies. I understood in that moment that our demise was inches away from my hand, I could feel it. Torn between loyalties I hesitated – what story would be told of me in my act of unfurling the truth, could I be further villainised, and in whose eyes? What is a betrayal of trust to him, to his privacy, if it means a truth that I would never have been privy to at the throat of his own? In my mind it wasn’t a matter of taking a risk, it was a matter of self-preservation. I lurched at his phone before unlocking it and reached for the name of a woman he worked with in his messages. “When can I come over?” she had asked two nights prior. The same night he had told me he needed a night to himself. “Whenever you want” he’d responded. I saw red, everywhere. My hands shook as the heat quickly rose in my cheeks. I was a half-woman, half-beast entity as I emerged from the bathroom slamming the door open in my man hunt. I didn’t scream initially. Instead, I taunted, viciously questioning him, his phone still gripped in my hand as I backed him into his bedroom on the other side of the house. One question for every march forward. I felt like I was made of steel – I wanted to crush him, to reprimand him, to watch his six-foot four stature weaken and shrink at the hands of his own undoing. I stood screaming every version of HOW COULD YOU? at him from the opposite side of the bed until the words reverberated off of the walls and smacked me in the chest. I had nothing left in me – he had taken it all.
Was I standing in the same place that she had? Did she scream too? My bad deeds hadn’t gone unpunished, my punitive measures were standing right in front of me.

I stopped speaking to him, and instead found any opportunity to slander his name to anybody that would listen. I felt weak and deflated where I wanted to feel rage. But more than that, I wanted the last nine months of my life back, to turn back the clock, to locate a version of myself in a time warp that I couldn’t reach and tell myself, please, please, please don’t do it. Work wasn’t an escape either. It felt like a form of mild torture knowing that he was just metres away from me, that I couldn’t speak to him, that I couldn’t undo what he had done. I wanted to hate him, to act in childish ways to spite him, but a love undeclared and a love lost does not equate to a love suddenly gone.

Despite the proximity, I was resolute – I would never speak to him again. In my mind our territories were mapped, and I trusted that our mutual shame would refrain us from crossing into one another’s for any reason. I had nothing left to give, and I surmised that he had nothing left to take from me.

Two weeks passed, and I missed him as fiercely as I resented him. My evenings once more spent inspecting my memories of us with a fine-tooth comb, only to come up short. My mirages offering little more than grievances, hurt, regret. We hadn’t spoken. It was the longest silence between us since we’d met.
Then, late one night at work, my phone buzzed with a message from my roommate: someone was in the house. The panic in her words was immediate. I showed the message to my manager – he knew her – and without hesitation, he told me to go and check on things.
When I arrived home, I couldn’t find her anywhere, despite my repetitive laps of rooms in the house and the backyard, despite my calling out her name over and again. I began to feel unsettled, unsafe. Until suddenly she appeared standing before the front door in total silence, a smirk stretched across her face. “Hey!” I called out, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, are you okay?” She didn’t respond. “Lucy?.. Lucyyyy? Are you good?”. “They’re here for you” she told me, “they want you”. Absolutely-fucking-not-no-way. She threw her head back and cackled and I felt like I was in a waking nightmare. Don’t show fear, I told myself as I made small strides towards her. “Hey” I offered, “maybe let’s step out of the house for a moment, yeah?” She said nothing, but kept her eyes locked on mine as I broached the distance between us toward the front door. “Okayyy” I said weakly as I opened the door and stepped on the other side of it, “come on, let’s get out of here”. She cackled again before slamming the door in my face and locking it. I took a few small steps back in disbelief before beginning to run to his house. It was fear as much it was instinct. I was petrified, and in that moment, I needed him. I called and after two rings, he picked up.
By the time I’d arrived out of breath, he had already backed his car onto the road. “What is going on?” he asked. “I really don’t know, but I just really need your help with this right now”.
When we arrived at my house the front door opened with ease, and we looked at each other with uncertainty not knowing what we were walking into. I stood behind him like a scared child – was she going to jump out with a knife? would I find her hanging from the ceiling waiting to pounce, exorcist style? There was a sense of calm that I found in his presence, but I hated that I recognised the comfort in having him there beside me.
We found her in the kitchen, her stature identical to what I’d witnessed before she locked me out. Cold, unmoving, and terrifying. The same smirk that I’d witnessed moments before still spread across her face. It took the both of us, and countless attempts, but eventually we persuaded her to leave the premises. Where after several alarming statements surrounding who and what entity apparently wanted me, she seemed to return to herself. “I’m not staying in this demon house tonight. Can we stay at yours?” she asked him out the front of our house. I looked at him, to her, and then to the ground. I didn’t particularly want to be with either of them, I still couldn’t fathom what had just occurred, but I certainly wasn’t going to stay in the house that had apparently possessed my roommate. “Yeah, of course, that’s fine” he responded before looking at me as if to say, “are you ok with that?”. I couldn’t meet his eye.
Despite the unnerving circumstances, there was a level of security and familiarity in having him in my home again, in having him by my side. Fear had erased my composure as a forthright woman who had cursed him just weeks prior. I didn’t trust myself around him, but nonetheless, I got into his car.
It played out before me exactly as I knew it would. Lucy took the couch, he didn’t have a spare bed, and before I knew it, I was leaning into him beyond a figurative sense of the meaning. I could’ve refrained, playing the scenes and pain over again in my body, in my mind, but it was another moment of weakness, as it had been so many occasions before. He had grown to feel like a part of me, as though we were tethered. I’d considered myself as having a forgiving disposition, but in all honesty, I’d found a home in him despite the circumstances – I wasn’t ready to let him go.

Three more months passed. In that time, he vowed to have nothing to do with the other woman at his workplace. Claiming that he was revolted by her, and I accepted this as a form of repentance. As though she were a reminder of his misdeeds, his wrongdoings, his failing to respect my personhood. He sent me songs, made himself increasingly available to me, gifted me a book on chronic pain, helped my move into my new house, stopped pouring goat cheese oil into the smashed avocado and rubbed my back as I threw up in bed during endo flares. Despite all of the faults, and all of the flaws, we had finally landed in the promised land. The fantasy that was perpetually just out of reach for me was suddenly in the palm of my hands. He was there. It was real. I thought it was what I wanted, that it looked exactly as I had imagined. But there was an irrefutable undercurrent to all of our shared experiences. Had I forgiven him? I certainly hadn’t forgotten.

September brought with it my 24^th birthday, and to mark the occasion I had arranged for a lavish lunch at Oggi. The people that I loved the most were spread out before me on a table that reached from one end of the room to the other. I was in my element. Spreading myself thin between the sea of people, chair hopping as I indulged in conversation and various plates of pasta.
“Can I talk to you?” he whispered to me an hour into the afternoon. “Yeah, of course” I said, “what’s up?”. “Um, I can’t pay for my lunch today” he said. “I’m so sorry, do you mind covering me? I know it’s your birthday, but I promise I’ll take you out for breakfast and make it up to you”. “Yep” I responded curtly, “fine”. I was seething. Not just because his financial circumstances were affecting me on my birthday, but because of what it represented. On a day that was supposed to feel full, generous, and easy, he had not only rocked up empty handed, but had also asked me to pay for his food and copious cocktails. I found myself again, stepping in, smoothing over, holding things up – while he simply asked and assumed. I returned to the remainder of my guests with a forced smile and picked up my wine, hoping that it would dull the edge of the moment. It didn’t.

The following week, he took me out to breakfast as promised. Picking me up with an enormous arrangement of hand-picked natives, proudly telling me how he’d foraged them himself. It was an act that he had mentioned in passing during our time together – a romantic gesture that I’d quietly clung to. But in the moment, it landed hollow, stripped of the meaning I’d previously believed it would carry.
It was a nice morning together, but the aforementioned undercurrent was cutting through the air like a knife. As though we were playing pretend. As though everything that I had seemingly forgiven was manifesting in a passive rage toward him. We finished our breakfast, asked for the bill, and when he’d offered up his card, our waitress returned to the table shortly afterward to let us know that it had been declined. He looked at me like a small, embarrassed boy. “I’m so sorry” he started, “I promise I’ll get you back for lunch and for today”. “Mmm, all good” I responded, passing my card over to the waitress. Happy birthday to me, I guess.
I went to the bathroom before we left, the weight of my body dramatically leaning into the basin as I exhaled before meeting my eyes in the mirror. What are you doing? I asked myself before entering the carpark to meet him.
He tried in vain, to make conversation that was a formidable distance from what we’d just experienced, to where he was pretending that we were. I couldn’t do it. I saw my future with him, with a person I could now poke holes in, a person who I remembered had betrayed me, a person who seemingly could not stand on their own two feet and suddenly I didn’t want it. “Can you please pull the car over?” I asked him. “Yeah, sure, what’s going on?” he asked. “I can’t do this. You, me, us, I can’t do it.” I said. “But…I love you” he responded. The words I had been waiting for months to hear. It was too late. “No. You don’t” I said, “can you please take me home?”. We drove the remaining thirty minutes in silence. I don’t remember getting out of the car. I don’t remember leaving him.

There’s a power in being seen, really seen. Power in the way that veils disintegrate, walls collapse, voices carry with confidence in knowing that they are heard, and a particular breed of personhood evolves – a person of authenticity that comes to the surface when you are with them. When I spoke, he listened, he lifted corners, looked underneath, asking, where did that come from? I never shied away from showing him the parts that nobody had dared to look at, lest acknowledge in years. I would beckon him in that year, as if to say, come closer, if you lean in you will learn, do you hear that, do you see that? I came undone around him. All mess and no mask. I didn’t want to give that up, the experience of coming apart gently at the seams in front of a person who accepted every facet of me. A person who at the same time, was slowly unravelling themselves before me as though we had given each other permission to release, to breathe, to be. Though I would never admit it to myself until writing this, I loved him. I loved who I could become around him. That I was never deemed faulty, too much, too wanting despite everything. That I could be what others might’ve deemed excessive, too loud, too emotional, too wounded. We didn’t carry the same hurt, but I know we recognised it in each other. There was a certain freedom in that knowing, where we sustained a private world that abstained from judgement because of it. All mess and no mask. Friends asked me why I wouldn’t leave him. Seven years ago, I didn’t have the words. I do now.

How do you convince others, in failing to produce reason that a person was worth the risk? Sometimes you can’t. I left a path of destruction in my wake for somebody that chose me too late.

A lot of our conversations took place over the bar during his lunch breaks. He’d make his way upstairs with his kitchen counterparts, their presence boisterous and sometimes overbearing as they ordered a variety of drinks to consume at an unprecedented rate before returning to their manned stations for the dinner service. Oftentimes they resembled a small pack of animals in the way that they would figuratively beat their chests together on the bar stools, their voices carrying louder in an effort to take up space. I didn’t mind it though, frequently finding myself joining in on the comradery meant that I could draw harmless attention to myself in a way that mirrored their behaviour. Having had few successful friendships with men, I enjoyed the playful air that was shared between us all in those moments, believing that there was a facet of friendship I had been lacking in my then current relationships. As though men could offer me something that women couldn’t.

Despite these men almost always moving in a pack, there were moments when the chef would make his way upstairs in isolation before the rest of the herd followed. His arms folded out in front of him, his head resting on them sideways, his face looking mildly forlorn. It was during those moments that I could recognise that his sporadically self-deprecating manner (often presented under the guise of a comedic front) wanted to be acknowledged. I was under the impression that his resting sad face was reserved for his girlfriend to discover (she worked in the venue underneath his), until I soon learnt that it was almost always there because of her. He hadn’t wanted hers to be the voice of reason or concern, he’d wanted a friend, a perspective that could be offered to him by somebody who knew them equally, mutually. I lived with her so it seemed only fitting that I would assume the position of neutrality on the occasions he’d needed to vent. And I was happy to be of service to someone that I cared about, deriving pride in recognition that our friendship had become legitimate, but his partner was an intimidating woman. It was a facet of herself that she was aware of, and I’d watch in quiet fear as she would wield power over others, myself included.

In the fleeting periods when things weren’t tumultuous between the chef and his partner, I’d catch him in the hallway at our house, or in the kitchen. We’d sometimes saunter into the backyard together and share a coffee and a joint, our bodies relaxed in the sun with the confidence of two people momentarily tethered by another being who had woken up and chosen peace that day.
During other less chaotic periods the three of us would find ourselves together in the backyard, accompanied not by the afternoon sun but by the night sky. Drinks in hand at the table, sharing cigarettes and talking about god only knows. I enjoyed those moments more, largely because they were few and far between. I’d sometimes look over at my roommate in her moments of unadulterated joy and kindness and wonder why it wasn’t a state she’d wanted to maintain.

The months wore on and I gradually saw less and less of the chef at our house, observing that his crouched stature at the bar was at the same time, growing increasingly frequent. I didn’t know the explicit details of their impending demise, at least not from him, but a part of me resented her for having taken so much life out of him. It wasn’t my business, but it was difficult to watch. That was until what had resembled sadness quickly took on a new life form within him. Something in him finally snapped and he angered so suddenly that he ended it without a shred of remorse. I sat with her at the table outside in the dark whilst she drank Johnny Walker and cried. I almost felt like I was betraying him by comforting her, as though my condolences were insincere. They probably were. And maybe she knew, that my words were less comfort and more of an attempt to keep the tipping peace between us.
We didn’t live together for much longer afterward. Not on account of their break-up, but I knew that my maintaining a friendship with the chef infuriated her, as though she’d been the puppet master in our relationship, the glue that had bound us together.

Post-break up the chef and I began to spend more time together. No longer paranoid about being the recipients of unyielding glares or feeling as though we were walking on eggshells, our friendship took on a bigger, sturdier shape. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend the night at his, coaxing his dog toward the rug that the couch sat on top of in a high state where I would fall asleep. His roommates and I having worked together for so many months would spend a lot of time there in the living room, listening to Columbian music, drinking Pol and again sharing joints amongst the group well into the late hours of the night. I’d slide myself from the couch in the morning, neatly fold the bedding that the chef would offer me for my weekly sleepovers and slip out of the door quietly so as not to wake the three sleep deprived boys on my way out. It became the natural order of our weekends, occasionally sneaking in a big cook up together if by a stroke of luck, we all had the same night off. I loved those nights. Where the chef would dexterously lather pork belly in olive oil and a mountain of salt, and the boys would offer empty help and I would dance and sing around the kitchen as though I was the unpaid entertainer of the night. I always did the dishes in the morning before I left.

I stopped working at the bar, or more accurately, I was let go on account of not being a team player, whatever that meant. It was a blow to my ego having maintained a strong work ethic since I was fifteen, but in retrospect it was probably the right decision. I drank too much on break and had developed a rather spiteful attitude toward my manager who spoke to me like a child and did too much coke in the toilets on shift. He would later get fired, not because of the coke but because it would transpire that he was an anti-vaxxer. How the mighty fall.
My absence from the venues however, had little to no effect on my relationship with the chef. I didn’t see him quite as often given that we were no longer knocking off together, but we maintained our close rapport. When I got a new job at his family’s café afterward, he took me out to dinner to celebrate, as though I was remotely responsible for the opportunity to be back in the workforce.

During my jobless interim period, I had developed a particular hunger for both financial freedom and unfortunately, attention. Naturally, this saw the development of my pursuing OnlyFans, whereby I’d eat leftovers in bed and talk dirty to strangers on the internet, the entire thing felt so ridiculous.
The images I posted were at least by my standard, mild, so when the chef asked to see my page the night that he took me out for dinner, I rolled my eyes and slid my phone across the table without stopping to think twice about it. We were and had always been friends, I couldn’t fathom the likelihood that a bikini would be the thing that could tilt the axis we’d known. Until I woke up in the morning, not on the couch with his dog, but in his bed beside him. Panic burned my cheeks as I tried to maintain a cool and calm facade, but still I gathered my belongings at lightning-speed before he woke and made a swift Irish goodbye.
A few hours later he phoned me, and I could hear the terror in his voice as he apologised to me profusely. I felt terrible for leaving, I felt terrible that he had been swimming in this sea of guilt in isolation, believing that I had fled on account of him taking advantage of me. I talked him down off of his valid ledge of repentance, and entered into a repetitive dialogue about consent, about it taking two to tango, about how I’d enjoyed myself. He soon calmed, and what had previously sounded like terror became peaceful resolve. I had absolutely no idea where we now stood with one another, but I told him I would see him soon, quietly hoping for a mutual acceptance to bury the entire evening.

I can’t recall what happened in the short space between that night and what came next, it’s as though the building blocks of my memory have been chipped away at by guilt, by regret.
We hadn’t decidedly buried the evening as I’d anticipated, we’d unnaturally leant into it, assuming the positions of friends turned lovers. I stopped sleeping on the couch and would continue to wake in his bed. He would lean over in the mornings for a kiss and there was a tenacious voice in my head that said, this isn’t right. I could’ve listened to it, I could’ve acted and said anything that resembled a semblance of the truth, but it felt like a disservice. To him, to myself, to us. It wasn’t solely that he was a person that I cared about whom I was afraid to hurt, it was also a persistent longing that had existed within me for years – here was the good guy, the one that I had asked for, the one that I felt I deserved. I was determined by a self-fulfilling conviction, that should enough time pass I’d eventually cross the threshold that would see me look at him the same way that he looked at me. With warmth, and yearning, and affection. I wasn’t prepared to make any kind of an immediate decision, to rip the floor out from underneath him before I’d tried to shift my own footing, but I wasn’t prepared to be honest either. Instead, I paddled selfishly in the shallow end, watching as he swam deeper and deeper toward another demise I would continue to deny.

Weeks into the shift in our relationship, we had lunch at his family’s restaurant. He hadn’t expected that everybody would there, in fact, he’d been counting on the contrary. We ate together alone at a table with enough distance between ourselves and the rest of his family that our dialogue remained private to any onlookers. But distanced or not, their presence alone was enough to strike the guilty chord that was quietly lingering in me.
By the time we’d finished eating, it was well past lunch time and the restaurant had temporarily closed its doors between services. His family, still sat on the opposite side of the venue waved us over with enthusiastic smiles, and we joined them at their table for a leisurely glass of wine. I was nervous for conflicting reasons. Here was this charming, hospitable family going out of their way to make me feel welcome and comfortable, and there I was, simultaneously desperate for them to accept me whilst overcome with a fear that they could see right through me.
I tried in vain to suppress it, the feelings, the thoughts, the overwhelming sensation that I was not a kind person, that I was selfish and cruel to have had accepted his invitation to dip my toes into his world despite knowing I wouldn’t stay. But still clutching to my theory of time, I allowed myself the freedom to play pretend, to envision any sort of future with the chef where I could by proxy, become a part of a family. The kind where a father affectionately kisses his son on the forehead and an older sister makes jokes at nobody’s expense.

The week of my birthday marked two months of us seeing each other. Friends would ask me about him, and I would wish that they hadn’t. As though any response that I gave to their seemingly casual questions was an internal admission of my wavering morality because I couldn’t be honest. Too concerned that those closest to me would believe that my inability to commit derived from a history of emotionally unavailable men, I took to responding to their questions in a way that resembled a report card of his best achievements. ‘He’s wonderful’, and ‘he left flowers on my doorstep’, and ‘he told me I’m the most beautiful girl he’s ever known’. All of my masked feelings I would hide behind his efforts, as though by remarking positively on his kind and generous nature, it could be easily assumed that it was safe to conflate his actions with my feelings.
It only worked for so long. The mornings with him began to chip away at me, a combination of misguided aversion and impatience seeing me spring out of bed before he had the chance to touch me. His presence that I’d been attempting to convince myself that I welcomed and enjoyed had irrefutably become an irritation. So deep was I in our faux relationship, I began to feel entitled to my frustrations, as though they only existed because he was suffocating me, and not because I was behaving like a petulant, selfish child.
Still unable to communicate anything that I was feeling toward him, I pulled right back, twisting the knife with each pace away from him. His messages would remain unanswered for days, his phone calls would be ignored. And with every one of his attempts to broach the distance that I was creating, I would feel further entitled to maintain my cruel stance.

I stopped working at his family’s café. A fortuitous opportunity in that I was poached for a new role, and that it organically allowed me to sustain the void that I was refusing to acknowledge. I was beginning to wipe my hands clean with a mildly guilty conscience, one that was twisting a separate knife of its own: was I simply incapable of romantic feelings toward him (making me a terrible person in my omission), or had I over time and with experiences developed an unhealthy attachment style whereby ‘nice guys’ no longer stood a chance with me? The latter, whilst it felt like a terrifying prospect, seemed the only appropriate hill for me to die on. I wouldn’t tell him this, but in the weeks that followed a fate of my own doing, I would clutch to the idea that it had little to do with him. I couldn’t reckon with acknowledging all of the ways that I’d fed him tiny morsels of hope only to disappear entirely.

The days of my silence stretched into weeks, and he had begun to mirror my behaviour entirely. Something that I mistakenly took with relief as reciprocity, believing that we’d quietly and respectively flatlined. But eventually he reached out, of course he did. We’d known each other for too long that no matter how stubborn my behaviour had become, a conversation was inevitable.
Although I tried to avoid it with an unreasonable list of excuses pertaining to a ridiculously busy schedule, we decided to meet on his lunch break. He was cold and callous. I remember being taken aback because I’d never seen him like that before, at least never toward me. And I should’ve been sympathetic, had I any shred of compassion, but I had become everything that I’d previously loathed in all of the men that had hurt me; entitled and unfeeling. In retrospect it was a vicious kind of full-circle moment as he sat on a bench and pointedly asked me what had happened, the same way that I had asked that same question to so many men before him. I don’t remember how I responded, only that in an effort to shield his feelings I leant too heavily on the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ trope. Something that I regret, something that I would do not for the first time, but certainly for the last time.

It was my first job following the nationwide lockdowns, and despite how much I wanted to be working again, I was riddled with nerves. What if I’d forgotten how to speak to people? What if all of my milk was bad? Would I fit in with this small, tight-knit group of people who acted more like family than colleagues? I was so familiar with the dynamic from experiencing it myself in previous years, but my anxiety was telling me that I was a dumb loser who would never make friends there, and that all of my coffees would be disgusting.

On my first shift post-trial, I was familiarising myself with my new setting, steaming my little heart out whilst I observed one of the owners greeting almost every single customer by name. Despite the café being small in size, the community was a pretty vast sea of individuals who looked like iterations of the kind of people you’d find in Brunswick, myself and my crop cut included. During a quiet period in the day, I was keeping myself busy, refusing to let my hands idle in an effort to ensure that my new bosses understood that I was a strong and reliable workhorse. I had an intense paranoia about being let go after I’d been unfairly dismissed from a previous role as a barista, hence my unprecedented anxiety. Collecting a handful of used coffee cups and saucers in my nervous efforts to stay busy, I entered the back where the barista was stood at his allocated posted for the day: dishy. He was exactly my type for that given era of my life: an unruly head of hair, instrumentally inclined, wearing a pair of dirty, baggy jeans that made me question his personal hygiene.
It was almost immediate between us – as though our pheromones were living and breathing inside of the cups still in my hands and had suddenly jumped out and smacked us in the face. We made small talk about our weekend plans over the sink, discovering first that we were attending the same gig that very evening, and secondly that our birthdays were two days apart. “What are the odds?” I asked him with a smile. He looked at me and laughed in a way that said I would be seeing him later. And I did.
After running into him briefly at the gig and saying a quick hello, I decided on messaging him afterwards to determine his whereabouts. We were both going to the same club for the after-party. What are the odds. I don’t know if I intended to hook up with him when I instigated conversation in the digital ether (probably), but either way it happened. And in true me fashion, it occurred on the dancefloor in front of a sea of people. I hate to love a public smooch.

In the following days it was hard to avoid each other. Given we had so few staff members, we were working together frequently but I still couldn’t determine how to behave around him. Were we taking the route of pretending like nothing had happened, resuming our positions as merely co-workers, or were we taking the route of pretending like nothing had happened knowing that it would occur again. I’d discovered a few days earlier from our bosses that he’d recently experienced a break-up with his long-term partner. And I should’ve known to stay away, but at twenty-three, despite my wobbly self-esteem and lingering anxiety, I’d still deemed myself untouchable. An impenetrable castle of a woman who thought she knew more than she really did. I weighed the scales of potential hurt and immediately waved them away as though I believed I had a willpower made of steel. As though all of the men before him had pulled me down with so much hurt, I’d already hit my quota of low. So, when he invited me to a wedding the following weekend, I threw every ounce of caution to the wind – Why not?

It was difficult for me to determine just how serious he was about the invitation. He’d mentioned it first in passing at work, and again as we were getting into our cars to go home. Was I actually going to attend the wedding of strangers with a man I barely knew? It felt like a loose offer, one disguised in jest but sincere under the surface. I decided to be brazen and follow up on his offer. I messaged him on Facebook asking what colour scheme we were going for, and he promptly replied with a picture of himself in his outfit. “does this answer yr question. I’m thinking, earth and clear blu 11AM sky”. “Hmm” I responded, “I don’t have anything blue tho”. “Bugga!!!” he said, “dominant colour has become green. taking the semi formal vibe incredibly semi”. “I have emerald green” I said, “a frock. that is.” “lovely” he said, “can’t wait to be defrocked on my wedding night”. “I can” I told him.

Without the combined buffer of our working environment and our mutual, horny discretion, I expected things to feel a little less charged between us out in broad daylight. We shared a bottle of wine between us at a small bar, and there was again an element of reciprocal sincerity that we were offering to one another. I was surprised. It wasn’t as though he immediately appeared as any kind of womaniser, it was that I was hyper-aware of his recently single status and had naturally assumed that he would be too caught up in grieving his relationship to want to explore something with somebody new. But still, there we were, having drinks together before attending his friend’s wedding.
The entire night had an air of excitement to it. We were role playing as a married couple, speaking in French accents without warning, and posing for photos together in the pop-up booth at the event. Then, with a morsel of notice, he quickly mentioned that he had to attend a gig briefly, and did I want to come? At this point, I’d stopped erring on the side of caution and was completely immersed in the evening – fuck it, let’s get in an Uber.
We left the city and arrived at Thebby Theatre. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but as we made our way inside, he told me to take a seat, and that they wouldn’t be performing for too long. Wait, what? He’d failed to mention that it wasn’t so much attending a gig, as it was him playing one. I found a seat in the scarcely filled room and watched on as he played the drums for half an hour with a band that I still wasn’t certain he was even a part of. To this day, I still don’t know.

In the days that followed our secret night out, things continued between us. At work we were colleagues who bordered on strangers, barely sustaining conversation with one another despite the close proximity, but behind closed doors we were spending upwards of four nights a week together. It quickly became habitual. We’d finish work and pretend to go our separate ways only to meet up moments later and spend the night together. Within the month, he’d allocated a toothbrush for me at his house, and it wasn’t unusual for me to leave my belongings at his place. I’d wear his ten sizes too big trackies to bed and he’d tell me how he’d been looking for a more appropriately sized pair at the op shop for me to keep at his. We’d go to bars in the city, and he’d tipsily divulge information to me about his parents, his upbringing. We’d cook food at our respective houses and put the leftovers aside for one another. He would see me with my nephew and bite down on his fist, making jokes about our future children. It was the little things, offerings that were more like scraps that I held onto in an attempt to convince myself that he cared. I was starting to care, a lot, but we were still pretending to know each other on a very surface level in public and it had started to gnaw away at me. I’d walk to work the morning after, only to see him mere hours later, greeting each other as though we hadn’t fallen asleep together the night before. In those earlier days, it was horny. The act of trying not to get caught only amplifying things between us. He told me we should keep it to ourselves for the sake of my job security as a new staff member, and I believed him.

As the weeks went by, I was beginning to feel something that resembled jaded. Not only did he have a strong relationship with our bosses (a married couple) having worked there for so long, but one his closest friends worked with us, whilst another worked two doors down and frequented the café often – they both knew. It was isolating. I was still relatively new and trying to determine my social standing within our small staff dynamic, but there was nobody around me who knew him that I could talk to about it. We had knock off drinks all the time. I’d sit there with him, our bosses, and sometimes two of his closest friends. The four of us now too well-versed in pretending nothing was happening between him and I, whilst I sat there uncomfortably avoiding his gaze in case my face gave something away. Sometimes when it was him and I with just our bosses, I felt more like a bystander to their three-person act than someone who was involved in the dialogue. I didn’t know how to appropriately behave as a new employee, colleague, and potential person-of-secret-romantic-interest simultaneously. It was obvious that the three of them were close, but it felt as though their stories were so well rehearsed, that they were happy simply to have somebody new as an audience. I felt like a seal, clapping along to their tales idiotically, not knowing how to organically participate out of fear that I’d say the wrong thing.

Two months into us sleeping together, I had started to grow comfortable despite my denial. I looked forward to our nights together, of Hungry Jacks, of Handmaid’s Tale or The Simpsons, of falling asleep with my head against his chest as he kissed my forehead. Those forehead kisses really fucked with me. I refused to believe that they were anything other than a romantic notion toward me, taking them at face value, but contorting them into something much bigger than what they actually were as a means of proof. I did that with a lot of his gestures, confusing them for something else when he had been showing me who he was the entire time. I started to grow more anxious, recognising the pit in my stomach for what it was when our nights together dwindled from four, to one or two a week. But as a typical twenty-three-year-old woman with a big crush, I decidedly ignored it. Instead, downloading Tinder in an effort to quash my feelings by way of redirecting my attention from him, onto somebody else. I was so convinced I could do it, be the kind of woman that could sleep with multiple people casually, collecting myself in a cool and calm manner, because I ‘didn’t care’. A few days into my lazily swiping between profiles I was disinterested in he came over to spend the night. “I think maybe… we should sleep with other people too? Just to be safe, you know” he said. “Yep. I agree” I told him confidently, despite the sinking feeling in my gut. “I actually downloaded Tinder the other day”. “Wow” he said smiling, “that’s hot”. I couldn’t determine what it was. Had he sensed that I was growing too attached to him or had he already found somebody else that he wanted to sleep with? No matter, I was a cool girl. The kind who was nonchalant about being kept a secret whilst he fucked other women.

And so began my series of unfortunate events. In an effort to appear cool, I did what any young woman in denial about her feelings does: I acted a fool. Having been reduced to little time with him, I would clutch at anything he gave me. Often jumping out of bed at eleven o’clock at night in response to his ‘wyd’s’, driving to his house just to spend a few hours with him. I tried everything in my arsenal. I went to his house in a novelty-sized coat wearing nothing but a purple wig, lingerie, and thigh-high pleasers underneath. On another occasion, I gave him twenty-minutes notice before rocking up almost unannounced, high on mushrooms believing he would find it endearing, only for him to drop me home. I’d send him suggestive photos in an effort to get a fraction of his attention, even if I didn’t see him on the same evening. I even went as far as coaxing him into seeing me by using a bag of coke I’d stolen from a client as bait.
Sometimes he would message me and tell me how horny he was. I always thought it was an invitation, but so often he would inform me moments later that he needed a night to himself. It’s hard to know if that was a conscious act – seemingly offering a handful of crumbs only to blow them away in the next breath. I didn’t know who the other woman was, but I knew she existed. Why else had I been repositioned to second string so quickly following our earlier conversation? But I was deliriously determined. I thought if we continued seeing each other at any capacity he would come to his senses, change his mind about me and suddenly realise that I was sexy and smart and fun and charming, the way he’d told me I was. That he’d want to forgo the other potential women and give what we had a shot. I wanted to be open to all of it, to not have my feelings hurt, to not come second, to not be kept a secret in the stark hours of the day. I was swimming in a sea of shame, I just wanted to be wanted.

The dynamic between us continued to shift. There were no more suspiciously timed smoke breaks, no more stolen kisses when nobody was around, no more shared long glances, or brushing up against each other behind the coffee machine ‘accidentally’. Purposefully acting as though we were hardly friends was one thing, but this became something else entirely. Suddenly he really did feel like a stranger. Whatever copacetic work relationship we’d created was slipping, and my anxiety was ceiling high. I decided to confront him, not in an aggressive manner, but it felt as though he was avoiding me and I needed transparency. I asked if we could grab a drink after work, and he said he would come over and meet me at mine. I felt my stomach in my throat. I knew what was coming, and I felt so despondent towards all of it.
When he got to mine, he gave me a five-minute spiel on how poor his mental health had gotten, that he just needed some time to himself, and could we press pause for a bit? I was overly sympathetic to his cause, asking if he had a therapist, and encouraging him to take all of the time that he needed to get back to himself. It was obvious that I was upset, and I could sense that he wanted to comfort me, but he wouldn’t go near me. As though I’d confuse any physical act of consolation toward me as something that it no longer was.

A few days later at work, a woman he’d recently become friends with came into the café with her friends. I knew she’d recently moved to Adelaide from Melbourne, namely because my bosses talked about almost everyone, seeing me always knowing too much about people I didn’t know. I didn’t take much notice of them at first, giving the small group a distracted hello as I kept my head down behind the machine. It wasn’t until later, when she came back inside from the outdoor area to ask for something that I saw it, she was wearing his hoody. How did I know it was his you might ask? Because I’d worn the same one to breakfast before too. That lying little shit, I thought to myself. I was seething. Not because he was sleeping with someone else, that much was obvious, but because he’d weaponised his mental health as a means to avoid being honest with me about it, all the while keeping me as a faux placeholder. I felt like I was bursting at the seams, so desperate to be honest with my bosses about it who I’d forged my own friendship with, just to have a semblance of confirmation bias. I wanted them to tell me, yes, he’s awful! What a terrible, awful, horrible man! But I couldn’t say anything. I was still so anxious about them finding out, discovering that I’d been lying to them for months, five days a week and then some. I was not about to potentially lose my job over a man who tried to bring the term ‘shawtie’ back.

Weeks passed, and I hadn’t heard a peep out of him, nor had I seen him at work. Despite my suspicions surrounding the woman in the hoody, I didn’t have anybody in proximity to confirm them. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place; existing in a state of tight-lipped limbo that he’d relegated me to the moment he asked us to momentarily pause things before he went silent. It felt unfair, and it was. I knew then that the position that I was in would be perpetual if I didn’t take it upon myself to again, seek clarity on whatever it was that was or wasn’t happening between us. Nervously, I phoned him, and we very awkwardly organised to meet at our local pub for a drink. I timed it out in vain, making sure that we were meeting on the day that I was getting my hair done, as though me being blonde would miraculously see him change his mind about me. It didn’t work. I remember that afternoon feeling so bizarre, as though I was sitting in front of somebody who looked and sounded just like him but was a completely different person. I asked him what had happened in the space between, and he told me completely expressionless that his feelings had changed completely, that it was just something that happened to him. I don’t recall what I said in response, only him walking away from the table.

Not long after our conversation took place, I was having knock offs after work with the barista nowhere to be seen. He’d begun to take significant amounts of time off for his music-related personal work endeavours. And I couldn’t have been more grateful to finally be relieved of playing pretend when he was in the same vicinity as me. I’d completely ran out of steam, I had nothing left to give to the cause. We were doing our usual shtick of drinking too much and equally hogging the iPod to queue our favourite, most annoying songs when one of my bosses mentioned the barista. It must have been written all over my face. I can’t say I’m surprised, we were likely down six vodka slushies each, and any version of a poker face I’d been maintaining for the previous three months completely crumbled. I was pissed in every sense of the meaning. “Oh, Tor” one of my bosses said sympathetically with an equally sad expression on her face, “we know”. Queue the tears. When I tell you I sobbed, I mean I cried like an adult-sized baby while everyone took turns looking at me like I was the saddest girl they’d ever seen. It was deeply uncomfortable. And before I could assess if it was even appropriate, I was drunkenly divulging everything to everyone sat at the table outside. I. did. not. miss. a. beat.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting in terms of a response, I just wanted the opportunity to finally have an honest conversation about him with people who really knew him. It felt as though the biggest weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Not purely because of the extreme amounts of sympathy I was quickly garnering but because I was vindicated – my suspicions about Melbourne-hoody-woman were immediately confirmed despite having never asked. Everyone that I worked with not only knew about our not-so-secret months long rendezvous, but they also knew that he was already dating her. I stopped crying and saw red instead.

Being in my early twenties, I wasn’t particularly well-versed in letting things go. I didn’t want enlightenment or peace; I wanted the final word. For him to know that I knew, everything. A few days after my world-shattering-post-work-drinks, I messaged him asking for my belongings back – it was a trap that he likely saw coming. He confirmed that he had my things and would drop them off shortly, and I sat in my bedroom on the second floor staring out the window waiting for him to arrive with the rage of a woman wronged. I saw his car pull up first, and his message informing me that my things were on the doorstep second. When I tell you I sprinted down those stairs – my god – I was like lightning. Not so fast, bucko!!! I caught him. Stuck my head in his passenger window with all of my dignity left back inside my house and blurted out that everybody knew everything, myself included. I really don’t remember what happened next, although I wish I could. Raising my voice wasn’t in my character and still isn’t, but I’m sure I dramatically expressed my feelings and later felt worse for it. As though I wasn’t entitled to my outrage.

Eventually, he was dismissed from the café after requesting too many consistent days off. The final straw being our bosses seeing footage of him on Instagram, drinking bubbles on a boat interstate, ‘that doesn’t look like work to us!’ And I should have again felt vindicated, but it wasn’t enough for me. I was relieved to have him out of my life in a professional capacity, finally feeling as though I could take up space at work. But for months afterward, I couldn’t stop myself from asking why I was never enough for him. Consistently poking holes in any self-advocating theories that I was desperately trying to produce as a means to mend my self-esteem. He was a canon event, and a different version of the same man that I had half-dated multiple times before him but had never really learnt from. An insidious breed of half-boy, half-man with an enticing front of emotional intelligence, and a habit of taking whatever they believe to be rightfully theirs in the moment. Dating him altered how I perceived myself for longer than I would like to admit, but it was a fundamental lesson in the manifestation of denying myself so many things simultaneously. Namely, the act of being honest with myself and all of that I desired. As though I wasn’t entitled to those things in the first place. I really do believe that meeting him shrunk me to a size that was so uncomfortable in stature, that I would never again contort myself to fit somebody else’s brief of ‘woman’. In all of the years since knowing him, despite all of the dating horror stories, I never have, and I will never again deny myself of all of my wants and all my desires. As they say, a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

It was March 2022. I’d been working at this café for a little less than a year, but long enough to have spent enough time with my bosses that it wasn’t uncommon for them to know the details of my personal life, and I theirs. Such is hospitality life – it fosters a specific air of closeness and familiarity simply by nature of the work itself. It’s funny how intimate these relationships can grow to be in these environments, and so quickly too. You blink and suddenly you understand these individuals on a deep interpersonal level; their pasts and invisible passions, where their hurt lies and where it was bred, certain people who irk them and why, particular eating habits and where they came from, people they’ve loved and lost, why they excel in some areas, and fumble in others. There are so many moments where you feel like one brain, sensing another person’s movements before they’ve happened, reading the tells on someone’s face, I liken it to a dance because so often that’s how it feels.

We would often have knock offs together, sometimes up to four days a week. Another facet of the industry that’s probably far too common. It’s easy to convince yourself that you deserve something to take the edge off of waiting on people all day. We had some great regulars, but Covid altered something fundamental in a lot of people, and following the cessation of lockdowns, it wasn’t unusual for people to bark orders at you without so much as a hello first. Naturally, this started to take a toll on me, and so I made an active decision to try to nurture the surface level relationships with the customers I saw almost daily, the regular included.

On one particular day we got to talking more than usual. It was Fringe season, which meant I had more conversational stuffing up my sleeve should I need to lean on it, and I did. We started talking about shows, and events, what we were going to see, and what we’d attended in previous years, when he asked me if I was going to WOMAD. “Actually yes” I said, “I’ve never been before, but one of my friends has a food truck, so I’m gonna be helping her on the Saturday for a bit, and then I get to do my own thing afterwards”. “Oh cool” he said, “well I’ve got a weekend pass so maybe on the Saturday when you’re finished, we could meet up?” “Yeah, sure! I have another friend who’s going to be speaking at the Planet Talks if you’re interested in listening to that in the afternoon?” “That’s great” he said, “I was actually already planning to go to that, so that works out”. I left his table and headed back into the kitchen (also universally known as the gossip area) eager to update my bosses on our conversation because I’ve always been incapable of keeping much to myself, and I knew that one of them was about to be thrilled. I wasn’t wrong. For context purposes, I worked for a married couple: she was the chef, and he was the front of house man (can I make it any more obvious), a decision made with intent due to her wanting to avoid customers where she could. This meant that anything that she knew about customers was almost solely from FOH talk and renditions, but even so, they often had comically opposed opinions of customers. “YEAH! GO TERRY!” he said after I told them, high-fiving me. (Terry was a nickname, not the product of an unaddressed naming error). “The regular?” she asked us, “wait which one is he, do we like him?” “seems nice enough” I said shrugging my shoulders and laughing with a look that said, ‘I have no idea’. Meanwhile, my other boss continued to sing his praises as though the two of them were best friends.

On the Saturday, the regular met me at the food truck in the afternoon, where we then made our way over to the Planet Talks to listen to Amelia charismatically discuss all things climate related to a large crowd. I felt cooler and smarter just by way of proxy, but not smart enough to answer some of the questions the regular began shooting at me afterwards. Don’t ask me! I don’t have an honours degree in environmental science! I wasn’t up on that stage! He was also blissfully unaware that I was high after having done a line of coke in the portaloo earlier. Why I had the bag I don’t remember, I never had a party drug era, knowing how poorly I respond to them, but I can recall that in this period of my life I was not taking care of myself. It wasn’t age related, I was twenty-seven years old and arguably old enough to know better, but I was living on a constant whim of poor decision making. It wasn’t unusual for me to be hungover on a weekday, and yet I would still wonder why all of my days bled into each other. I was seriously struggling with drinking, and seriously in denial about it. Looking back now, I do wonder how obvious it was to the people around me, I really did love the pub.

After a few hours, we’d covered almost every stretch of the parkland grounds, and every corner of conversation sustainable for two people who really don’t have that much in common. I wasn’t having the worst time, but I wasn’t feeling particularly excited by him either. But at this point of my life, I was still in the mind of forced optimism, not recognising when to leave things alone out of a hope bred from the glittering idea of potential. It was always less about saying no, and more about saying yes. A little like improv, and equally as punishing, I was always a fan of seeing how things could pan out.
Having exhausted most of our dialogue that we’d been forcefully stretching out, it felt as though the night was coming to an end. We were taking another lap of the grounds and had made it back to a row of portaloos we’d passed earlier when the regular asked me if I wanted a Ritalin. Hm. Despite not yet having my diagnosis, I already had my suspicions about my brain, but I’d never had Ritalin, and I thought it would be fun. “Ok!” I said, resigning myself to the night between us continuing to unfold. Mere moments later, the Ritalin barely down my oesophagus, the regular decides that actually, he’s pretty over WOMAD, and would I like to go back to his instead? Great. Why did I take this? And why did he offer it to me seconds before deciding he wants to leave? I knew sleep wasn’t on the cards, and for whatever reason I didn’t want to go home, so I threw caution to the wind and the next thing I knew we were enroute to his house.

It was dark when we entered, but the first thing I noticed when he gave me the walk through was that it was tidy. Eerily tidy. Despite it being full of all of the standard things you might find in one’s home, it looked like nobody lived in it. Like it was simply a place where he stored all of his belongings but didn’t use them. Strange, I thought to myself as we continued quietly to his bedroom to avoid waking up his roommate. His bedroom told a different story in that I didn’t feel the same level of disconnect I’d felt when I walked through the rest of his home. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, but his things littered about the space gave it, and him a sense of normalcy.
He invited me to sit on his bed whilst he rummaged through his bedside drawer. I didn’t know what he was looking for until he procured a small, white medicine bottle. “Do you want another Ritalin?” “yeah…sure, whyyy not?” I said. I didn’t know what the effects were supposed to be, but whatever I had expected, wasn’t happening. My brain felt like it was mirroring his house, eerily quiet, and uncomfortably orderly. He handed me two and without question I swallowed them. In hindsight, I can’t help but consider if this was an intentional move on his end, loading me up with stimulants before bedding me as though the Ritalin would double as a performance enhancing drug. Did it work? It’s hard to say, but it certainly didn’t hinder my attention to detail, which I was about to desperately need.

We’d been making out on his bed fully clothed for all of five minutes when he sat up to remove his shirt. “I hope this isn’t weird” he began, “but I’m wearing a bralette”. Huh, I thought to myself, not quite what I’d expected was in store for me. “I’m in the process of reconsidering my pronouns, and I’m also bisexual” he said as he began to unbutton his shirt. “That’s cool, yeah it’s um, it’s a really nice bralette”. I mean, it was, really very nice. I might’ve asked him where he got it from had it not been for the Ritalin making me increasingly hypervigilant about what was and wasn’t appropriate to say out loud.
I followed suit and began to remove my clothes alongside him as though we were a married couple of thirty plus years who had scheduled sex nights. There was no sense of intimacy, no lusting, or pining, it was again, strangely methodical. A shirt for a shirt, pants for pants, a bra for a bra. Turning to face me on his bed almost expressionless he asked, “can you sit on my face?”. It felt like we worked in an office together and he’d just asked me to go and grab something from the printer for him. Still, who was I to deny myself of the act? I am but a mere mortal. I willingly obliged and climbed aboard facing forward with my feet against his steel bedframe, reciprocating the gesture by way of hand. We continued on like this for a while, until he stopped momentarily to ask if I could play with his nipples. I felt like a deer in headlights, I’d never played with anyone’s nipples before, and considering that my sensitivity had decreased significantly in that area following my augmentation, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. How did it work? How frequently was I supposed to alternate given that I only had one free hand? Was there a certain amount of pressure I was supposed to know to apply? Was there a method? I didn’t know, but I summoned all of the confidence possible and acted as though I did. My toes were now grasping for life onto the small steel posts inside of his bedhead as my hands continued to alternate in a triangular motion: nipple, nipple, downstairs, nipple, downstairs, nipple, nipple. I felt like I was playing a human version of Bop-It! Twist it! Pull it! Flick it! I was growing weary. Minutes (that felt like hours) later he stops again, “do you mind if I put a toy inside of me?” At this point I was both weary and impatient, and knew it was only a matter of time until the balancing skills I’d finessed in the last thirty minutes gave out on me. “You go for your life” I encouraged him.
Eventually, we exhausted both ourselves and our foreplay and decided to call it a night despite not having seen anything through to completion. I didn’t care, I was too concerned about my toes and whether I’d permanently altered the shape of them after sustaining my monkey grip for an unnecessary amount of time. He rolled over and immediately went to sleep, and I laid in his bed with my brain rid of all thoughts until I almost met the next day’s sun.

Two days after WOMAD and all that came with it, I was beginning to feel extremely hot. Not in a sexy way, but in a I definitely have a fever way. I took a RAT and to no surprise tested positive immediately. “Hello” I messaged him, “just letting you know I’ve tested positive for Covid”. “Oh no” he responded, “that sucks! Does it make you feel any better that I’m on my way back from getting a PCR test, but I have also tested positive for a RAT about an hour ago? I was going to message you when I got home”.
For the next three days we continued messaging each other to discuss trivial things like Covid aches, groceries we’d purchased online, and tv that we were consuming. Gripping stuff. He was feeling mostly fine, indulging in ritzy groceries, and watching engrossing crime series’ whilst I felt rotten, couldn’t remember what I’d ordered from Woolworths, and was consuming MAFS at an alarming rate. One of these things is not like the other. He was also making an annoying habit of frequently discussing the upcoming election. Was I disappointed to miss out on my democracy sausage? had I signed up for my vote pack? had I posted it? followed by unsolicited advice after he’d discovered I hadn’t posted my vote on the same day that he had. “Don’t the instructions say you gotta post it by 5pm today? Like before polls close”. “Nah we’ve got until next Saturday to get it posted”. “Okay we’re both half right. You’ve got to fill it out, seal the blue envelope, and have it witnessed by 6pm tonight. Then you have to post it early enough so that it arrives at the Electoral Commission before next Saturday”. Did it bother me? Yes. Did it bother me enough not to invite him over that same evening because I was feeling sorry for myself? No.

When he arrived at mine, I was under the impression that it was going to be an afternoon of flopping under the air conditioner with minimal talking and trash tv – how wrong I was. He had been inside for all of five minutes when he asked, “Do you have a TV? I want to watch the election”. Did you see a tv, sir? “Um no, actually we don’t…but you can use my laptop if you really want to watch it?” “Yeah, that would be great”. And so, we spent the next five hours downstairs in the company of both Amelia (who also had Covid), and the running commentary from the live-streamed election broadcast. Me, star fished on the couch sweating with a Vicks inhaler wedged in my nostril, him, cross-legged on the floor engrossed in the tiny screen, and Amelia, stuck somewhere between us after he’d trapped her in his own hours-long running commentary. Poor girl, I knew she wanted my help from the looks she kept discreetly shooting at me, but I simply did not have the means.
When Amelia finally found the courage to interject to let him know she was going to bed (escaping), I realised that this was also my opportunity to vacate from my sweaty position on the downstairs couch. I also realised that I had the ick, and that there was no coming back from it. It’s one thing to be well-versed in the intricacies of Australian politics, but it’s another entirely to go to a woman’s home and not only expect her to devote her time to your interests, but also fail to engage in any conversation beyond them. By no means am I apolitical, I just prefer to get my election updates in real time via The Daily Aus, much like how I prefer a man to actually speak to me when he comes over. “Yeah” I said, “I think I’m also ready for bed” I chimed in. “Ok” he said, “no worries. Upstairs?” Please, go home.
When we made it to my bed his hands immediately began creeping towards my body. I knew what was coming, and even if I had still been into it, there was simply no way that I had the stamina to endure anything remotely similar to what had happened five nights prior. I pulled away from him, blaming it on my fever, why won’t this thing break already!? And he gently moved his hands back to the other side of my bed.

I decidedly pulled the plug on continuing to see him, later explaining that it was solely due to his desire for something casual, rather than admitting to him that I simply could not Bop-It! again or tolerate endless talk about the Labour party. He was graceful about the whole thing and continued to come into the café on account of my green lighting his inevitable attendance. But what the poor man didn’t know, was that every time he entered the venue, all my bosses could talk about was me playing with his nipples like a DJ deck. Such is hospitality life.

Me: Just wondering what time the gig is this week xx

Me: it is this week isn’t it xx

Marie: It’s this wednesdeee. It’s from 7 but I don’t think Marc will play until like 9, which is past our bed times, I will nap in preparation

Me: My goodness, we are aging, what time do you wanna go in?

Marie: Ummm, maybe from 8? I’m flexible, although we are meeting the dad for a drink before

Me: The dad?

Marie: Yes. We were hugging and I was telling you about the dad. He is an old friend from work and he’s great. He moved jobs so we agreed to have a drink together beforehand. He’s a Gemini 41 year old man who is very witty in personality and good taste in music

Me: Ohh I think I remember the 41 year old part haha

When we arrived, we purchased our overpriced drinks and beelined for the smoker’s area to meet him, but I soon bumped into one too many familiar faces and after briefly greeting the dad, I slunk back into the crowd, leaving Marie to her own devices. When the air smelled like the gig was soon to start, we made our way through the crowd to find our sweet spot (which actually doesn’t exist for two five feet tall women in a mosh pit) and watched through gaps between moving heads as Marc made his way on stage.
Ten minutes into the show, we were again greeted by a familiar face – it was the dad, explaining that he’d lost his friend, and would we mind if he stayed with us. “Of course not!” we chimed to him in unison as we ceased straining our necks and instead decided to just dance to the music we could hear.

When the gig was over halfway through, our bodies had been naturally interchanging positions of who was stood next to who, until I felt him slide into the position of standing closely behind me. I was trying to decipher if it was an intentional move on his part, so I took a small step back to bridge some of the distance between us when he slid his arm around my waist. Ah ha, I smirked to myself, before exchanging a look with Marie that said, who would’ve thought!? and, Is it ok if I hook up with your old colleague? Successfully reading my facial expressions, she laughed before giving me the silent green light. I turned my body toward his and looked up at him, noticing how handsome he was both up close and from a distance, and then he kissed me. We continued this dance, of my body turning back towards the stage momentarily before turning again to face him, to kiss him. I didn’t care for the strangers around me, or what they would think, I felt an immediate attraction towards him that was only intensified by knowing his age. It was that assumption of age and maturity growing parallel with one another, and I wondered briefly if I was kissing a man who was just that – a man.

When the gig ended, I wondered about the dad’s movements. Would he ask what I was doing post-gig, would he coyly tag along for the short walk back to my house, or had we simply exchanged a fleeting attraction turned shared moment of intimacy. I didn’t know him outside of what Marie had shared with me and was in no position to make any further assumptions. But to my surprise, he cheerfully joined us as we made our way back to my house, where Marie gathered her belongings at the speed of light and disappeared in an instant. The moment the front door closed, we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other; like moths to a flame, or two people charged with electric sexual chemistry. We fumbled our way up the stairs, clinging to each other lustfully before growing so impatient we tore each other’s clothes off in the upstairs bathroom. It was late enough that my roommates were in bed, but not late enough to know that they were well and truly asleep. I didn’t care – until I did – and in a moment of mid-sex clarity I quickly realised this was not an act I wanted to be caught in, nor were the tiles ideal for my knees. We gathered the coins that had flown out of his pockets, laughing as we made the short distance to my room to continue our escapades.

In the morning, I still wasn’t sure what to expect from him, but a large part of me believed that it would be a one-night stand, a reaching for underwear trailed by a mildly rigid goodbye and no follow through. I was both still ok with the idea of casual sex, and too accustomed to men’s morning after behaviours to expect any differently. I was also familiar with the immediate feelings that usually came after spending a night with someone – that they were out of my league, and I was kidding myself to have thought they could be interested in anything more with me. If you tell yourself something enough times, eventually you believe it. And if you expose yourself to enough men who lack respect for your personhood, you’ll have crippling self-esteem. But when he was dressed and lingering at my bedroom door, he asked for my number in the same manner one would confidently ask a rhetorical question, like it was a given. I was still wrapped naked in my quilt, suddenly suspicious that his age meant he was only being courteous, but still I gave it to him. When he left, I tried to maintain my composure as the hyper-independent woman I’d let myself become in recent years, attempting to convince myself that I didn’t care whether or not I heard from him. But when my phone pinged just a couple of hours later, I quickly realised how much I did in fact, care.

The next two days were a constant volley of messages between us, no thoughts left unsaid, no parts of our days left unshared. It was this immediate and very mutual openness that made me feel quite safe. I still hesitated before sending a message, re-reading my sentences to ensure I was making sense, and sounding smart, and being the right amount of funny. But the mental labour of quick quips was lessened by the ease that came with speaking to him. He would always ask me so many questions about my days, and I his, but I never felt as though we were at risk of running out of anything to talk about. It was apparent that neither of us could wait much longer before seeing the other, and so on the Saturday evening, despite his poker night and my waitressing shift, we spent another night together. This time, filling in all of the blanks of our respective nights, side by side in my bed in the late hours of the evening.

The next time we saw each other was three days later. An official first date spent in the Adelaide hills, eating a late lunch at a quiet restaurant outside. It felt like I was meeting him for the first time all over again; it was honest and sober and sincere, and he made me laugh until my stomach hurt. I remember looking at him, with his hand resting on my thigh, and feeling my insides flip. I wasn’t surprised at how quickly I was relinquishing myself to him, giving myself permission to lean into the unfamiliar territory of a crush that didn’t frighten me. It felt safe to let him see me, to gently lay some of my cards on the table without withholding. I told him about my years as a sex worker, and he didn’t bat an eye. He told me he had a sixteen-year-old daughter, and I thought he was kidding. I wasn’t concerned though, at least not initially. Despite being closer in age to his daughter than I was to him, I was slowly garnering that perhaps there was a larger gap between the two of them that wasn’t age related. I considered myself at sixteen, and my relationship with my own dad, and in that moment, I didn’t want to ask any further questions, I wasn’t prepared to burst the premature bubble.

A few nights later, I was booked for a bucks show down South, and was feeling more unenthusiastic towards the shift than I normally would. Don’t get me wrong, I never went into these shifts wholly optimistic – I was getting half (or sometimes fully) naked for men and figuratively clapping along to their cave men-like behaviours – but all I wanted to do was spend my Saturday night with the dad. It was a combination of being in the early stages of courtship and crushes, paired with a disdain for the industry after seven mostly gruelling years of maintaining two personas with conflicting values. It was my second shift back after my hiatus, where I ran away to Bali for six weeks because a man had punched his fist through a door three times just inches away from me. It terrified me, so I fled.
I had a sense of unease in my gut on the drive to my shift. Feelings I put down to nothing more than apprehension towards the industry, to the job, to the men. Logically it made sense after the aggression I’d experienced weeks prior – a situation I’d convinced myself I would never find myself in again. But I was kidding myself in believing that I had more control than I did, that I was ever safe when I entered those rooms. Seven years in the industry did that to me, it changed me on a molecular level. What used to be intolerable became a normal facet of the job. What I previously swore to myself I would never do, I did. And with each shift, and each passing year of crossing a threshold from shame to “empowerment”, it became frighteningly easy to convince myself that it was liberating. That I believed I was wholly unscathed simply by deducing that I’d never been in danger because I hadn’t been hurt or assaulted. It’s like that quote about swearing to never cross a line until one day you do, and the line ceases to exist. That’s what sex work is. You clutch to your lines when you enter it, vowing to remember them, and with enough time they vanish. Until the last line left is the one between you, and her, the one you swore to never blur. And then you vanish too. I’d created a false sense of security in believing that I’d never been seriously compromised. But on this night, everything changed, and I later learnt that the unease I’d experienced on my way there, was a deafening alarm bell. That was the night that altered me, another molecular shift. A part of me was taken that to this day, I know I’ll never get back.

In the weeks that followed my final shift (I quit immediately), the dad and I had begun to spend almost all of our free time together. We pressed our feet to the accelerator at a rate that should have concerned me but didn’t. With him there was routine, and joy, and a constant and very welcomed distraction. On the nights that we weren’t cooking dinner together followed by a movie on the couch, we were at The Olivia Hotel, trying new wines and getting lost in a small world of our own making. It was there that he told me he still loved his ex, and I didn’t panic. It was there that he told me he loved me for the first time, with tears in his eyes. “I love you. I am so in love with you Tori”. It became our place, a home away from home to sit on the balcony in the shade of the trees, away from the dry summer heat. It was where we spent most of our time, second to his green three-seater couch. Where I told him with my feet resting in his lap what had happened during that shift. It took two bottles of wine for me to find the words, to reach for the memories of the night that my brain hadn’t let me get close to for weeks. I don’t remember much outside of everything spilling out of me and him holding me afterwards. He was the second person I told, and the second person to call a spade, a spade.

As our relationship progressed, I tried with all of my might to sustain our love bubble, to make it some kind of an impenetrable forcefield between us, and the real world. The one that I was denying to myself that I was still existing in. There was a sense of safety and escapism with him, as though being with him was proof that I wasn’t irreversibly damaged after my experience, that I could love, and be loved. He embodied security in every essence of the meaning, and I would spend my free days at his house in solitude, curling up on the couch in the afternoons so excited at the prospect of him returning home from work. Of being able to spend more time with him, to cook dinner with him, to press my body against his and listen to him talk. I felt more at home in the walls of his house than I did my own, with the exception of every other weekend when his daughter would stay with him, and I would remove all traces of my existence from the house. It wasn’t that I was in any kind of denial about him having a daughter, it was that he rarely spoke about her, and she didn’t know about me. That was the first crack to show itself. I would poke and prod, trying gently to coax things out of him, to learn about her, and he would always successfully talk around it. Sometimes I would potter around his house when he had left for work in the morning and peer into her lifeless bedroom. It made me sad; it made me uncomfortable. There was no presence, no personality, not a single picture, plant, book. It looked like a barren spare bedroom made up for last minute overnights. There was no essence of a teenage girl to be found in the entire house. I felt sad for her, this young girl that I hadn’t met and had only seen a few pictures of. I felt worse when he would talk about having a baby with me, which happened almost every time we were intimate.

We continued on like this, for the first two months of our relationship. Lust, love, sex, wine, denial. We would drink heavily, professing our love and showering one another in sentiments of adoration only to fall asleep on his couch; where I would wake in the early hours of the morning trying to pry him off of it, and into bed. It never felt good afterwards, clutching my head and my stomach the next day only to do it all again with him the following evening. I understood both what I was running from and running toward, but I couldn’t understand what he’d wanted to escape. Personally, it was easier denying myself of sobriety, than to acknowledge what I’d experienced. I was too consumed by shame in the stark hours of daylight, still believing that I’d brought it on myself. But all the same, I was still too self-aware to believe that our routine was sustainable. And when I tried to envision our future together, it concerned me. I told him we needed to stop drinking and he agreed, but only a few nights later I found myself pulling him to his bed, not from the couch, but from his porch where he’d passed out because he didn’t have his keys. It was the second crack, but it felt more like a small earthquake.

I started spending more time at home, and less time loitering around his house waiting to see him, to spend time with him, but not for a lack of trying. I could feel myself losing traces of me, at the same time that I was watching him slowly shrink. He pulled back, and with him his demeanour shifted too. Suddenly, there were no nights during the week left for me, there simply wasn’t enough time between his work schedule and his evening hobbies. He had also begun to pick at everything that I said, leaning on his intellect to pull my thoughts apart and diminish anything I tried to talk about. I felt small, and childish, and completely rejected by the man who until recently, had been moving mountains to see me, and listening to me ramble with awe written all over his face. I tried, for the first time in my adult life, to communicate what I was experiencing on my side of the relationship, but it always fell on deaf ears. Love wasn’t supposed to be this hard this early on. I took to my journals to word vomit everything he wasn’t hearing me say.

21/04/23

I’ve spent the last couple of nights at his place, but tonight something felt off. He’s been less affectionate both physically, and verbally. He’s stopped showering me in ‘you’re so beautiful’ and ‘you’re so wonderful’, and ‘you’re so smart’. Maybe we did the thing, the thing everyone warns you against – the ‘what not to do’ – spending too much time together. Maybe whatever façade I was maintaining is cracking. Something is sitting in my gut. And I am so aware that I’ve had tendencies in the past, and potentially still do, to be overly sensitive in regard to the outward behaviours of others towards me. I’m starting to feel like a pest, like my presence is irking him, like he doesn’t want to kiss me, or hold me, or fuck me anymore. Is he wondering if this relationship, or me as a partner, if we’re viable? I felt seen and it felt so wonderful, and now I just feel small. Wondering if I’m enough for him. Wondering if these old patterns that have shook the dust off of themselves are rearing their ugly heads. Wondering if he’s still in love with me. Don’t want to talk about my feelings because I do that all the time and I think I might be too much.
Sometimes he makes me feel stupid. Or, sometimes I make me feel stupid – I don’t know which one it is.

02/05/23

I’m met with a minor blow and suddenly I’m 19, 21, 23, 24 all over again. Holding my breath for the words I’d have to pull out of them. ‘Yes, no, maybe, I’m not sure, not sure that I love you anymore, maybe we should sleep with other people, I’m not ready for a relationship, we’re both lost, this can’t go on’. All different versions of the same sentiment. And all the blows hit the same way – rendering me a hopeless version of myself. Desperate to make my way back; I would have crawled through glass if given the opportunity. Picked up the fragments of myself and stuck them back to my body with adhesive.

09/05/23

I’ve found myself slinking back to my old bedroom. Maybe I can have a conversation with my former self. Think she’d ask me what I’m doing. Lately I don’t know what music I like, or how to dress. Surprised I can even respond to my own name at this point. How did I get so far away from myself again? There’s too much inconsistency, I want to run and hide.

12/05/23

I miss you. Miss the version of you I met and loved. The you who couldn’t contain himself. Had to always touch me, always needed to tell me the things you were thinking about me. Told me you could kiss me forever, that you wanted me to have your baby. I miss the you before soups and strained conversation. Is it just me with one foot out? Or are we both playing pretend? Too worried about hurting you when you’re hurting me. I remember when you said how sure you were, something to the likes of that. How you said you felt it immediately, how you knew immediately. I’m tired all of the time now. Sitting idle, waiting for something, for my feelings to come flooding back. I want to be washed over by them again.

I wanted to leave the relationship, to crawl back to myself on my own with the aid of my friends. I wanted my hyper-independent self back, the version of me that had been created over years of rejection and mother issues and love that I’d instead decided to create for myself. But I wanted to be loved, too. It had been so long that I felt like I was owed it, that the universe was indebted to me for my years of grief and loneliness. I understood that I had one foot out of the door, but my desire to experience a big love forced me to pull it back out of the frame.
I wanted to go back to nights on the couch, not with the wine, but with his hands holding my face telling me that I was beautiful, that I was smart, that he could kiss me forever. I wanted to lay in his bed in the morning, my stomach hurting from laughing before my eyes were even open. I wanted to walk back down the aisles of Foodland together, picking the ingredients for our dinner and sneaking a bag of hash browns into the trolley, knowing he would cook them for me in the morning as he made me a coffee. I wanted to stand in any room of his house, knowing in a matter of moments he would appear and wrap his arms around me, kissing my head, cheeks, the back of my neck. I wanted to hold him and experience again, that feeling of jumping into love, not knowing or caring where I would land, because I was doing it with him. I wanted to see a future with him, but I was living in the very near past, longing for everything to go back to the way it was; still not understanding how we’d gotten there in the first place. It was still the beginning, I didn’t want it to be the beginning of the end too.

It was during this period of uncertainty, that one evening I experienced a terrible endo flare up. I was home alone at 11pm on a Saturday night, and after trying and failing to get a hold of all of my friends in close proximity, I phoned him. I didn’t want to lean on him, didn’t want to ask him for anything. I had already convinced myself I was too much, too hard, too difficult. But in that moment, I was so desperate for someone to help me, to drive me to the hospital, that I put my ego to the side. When he answered the phone, it was obvious that I’d woken him, “hello?” he slurred. “Hi, I’m so sorry for waking you up, just wondering if you got my message? Um, I think I need to go to the hospital”. He sighed loudly, with an air of something that felt like frustration, “Why? Why do you think you need to go to the hospital?” “I’m just having really awful period pain, it’s bad, like it’s alarmingly bad”. He sighed loudly again, and my earlier suspicions about him being frustrated with me were immediately confirmed, “do you want me to take you?” he was disgruntled, almost bitter sounding. “I mean, yeah… that’s why I’m phoning you, to ask you for help, I’ve tried so many people, but I can’t get a hold of anyone else” Another sigh followed by, “I don’t really know how hospitals work Tori”. A 41-year-old man with a teenage daughter, who apparently doesn’t know how hospitals work. I could have screamed. “Actually, don’t worry about it, someone’s calling me back now, I’ll sort something out”. It was a complete lie, and not to sound like a martyr, but I’d dealt with flare ups before, I didn’t need the added stress of a resentful partner who might have a small meltdown because they didn’t know where to park. I spent the remainder of the night clutching my stomach and cursing him, before finally falling into an angry and restless sleep.

In the morning I was seething, and resolute. It was the nail in the coffin for me, followed by another, smaller nail when I realised that I hadn’t heard from him, and it was almost eleven o’clock. Surely the man cannot still be asleep. In my head it was as good as done.
When he finally called to check in, I was sitting in my car at the beach trying to find a semblance of peace and explained to him how frustrated I was at his response, that I’d lied to him on account of feeling like a burden. “You made me feel as though it was the last thing on earth that you wanted to do, to help me”. “It was. The last thing I wanted to do. I just wanted to rest and sleep, and to not be awake”. It felt like someone had punched me in the gut. When we got off of the phone after talking in circles, I spoke to myself out loud like I was in a scene of an MA15+ fantasy movie about to take someone’s life: you know what needs to be done. I messaged him, asking if he would be home at a point during the day, and he responded yes, that he would be almost all day. “Can I come by now?” I asked him. “No, I’m not ready”. Not ready? NOT READY?

By the time he was “ready”, it was 6pm, and I’d forgotten everything I’d prepared to say earlier. I walked into his living room, and he looked terrible. We sat, we talked, we cried, and he explained to me how poor his mental health had gotten. That it was the reason he’d lapsed in being a wonderful partner, and a present, loving person. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? That your mental health had gotten this bad?” “I’ve been signalling” he said. “I’m not a mind reader, I can’t read between lines. I wish you had told me when it started to get this bad, I would’ve known how to show up for you, we could have talked about this together. I felt like I’d done something wrong, like you were punishing me for something I didn’t know I did”. “I thought I could fix it all on my own” he said sadly. “It doesn’t work that way, you have to let people in, nobody can do it on their own, every single person needs love and support when it gets this bad. I don’t always get it right when it comes to my own mental health, and I wouldn’t have held your hand and walked you through the doors, but I could have at least helped you to find them”. “What if… can I just have two weeks?” “and then what? Two weeks to do what?” “I just need to get on top of work, and sleep, and the rest is life”. “It doesn’t work that way, something this big doesn’t just go away in a fortnight”. “So, what’s your decision then?” “Well, fuck… If I stay, I feel like I’m choosing you and your well-being over me and my own, and if I leave, I feel like I’m abandoning you in your hour of need”. More tears. “So” he said again, “what’s your decision?” I looked down in my lap at my scrunched, soggy ball of tissues that were enmeshed with my hands and his. “I love you” I said, “but two weeks isn’t going to fix or change anything”. He dropped my hands and stood up before asking me to please leave. I cried like a baby and stood to gather my remaining belongings from the room whilst he settled into his computer chair at his desk, his back turned to me. “Thanks” he said bitterly. “Why are you suddenly being nasty?” “I’m not, I don’t hate you Tori, I just have things I need to get done”. “This is really difficult, I don’t want to not have you in my life” I choked out, standing in the middle of the living room not knowing what to do with myself. “You don’t have to” he said. “And what… what if nothing changes in two weeks?” “then we’ve lost two weeks” he said. Resigned to my people pleasing tendencies and triggered by my history with my mum (fearing he would do something drastic), I agreed to the two weeks. But the moment I reversed out of his driveway, I knew that I’d made an error in judgement.

A week of regret later, I finally mustered up the courage to find clarity and resolve regarding our relationship. I messaged him and asked to come over, and this time he didn’t leave me in six hours of lieu; he knew what was coming. It was easier the second time around, despite his tears and his pleas. I knew I both needed and deserved more, that I didn’t want to hold a 41-year-old man’s hand as he dealt with both years of regret and unhappiness, and a strained relationship with his teenage daughter that I’m not sure he’ll ever give the time and effort that it deserves.
This time when I drove away, I felt nothing but relief. There were no tears, there was no pain, or sadness, just reprieve, and a knowing that for the first time in my life, I had recognised that a partner wasn’t serving me, and had decided against waiting for it to get better. I felt proud of myself, not only for understanding my needs, but for walking away from a person who in previous years, I would have clung to for love and support. It’s amazing though, how lightly I leant on him during that period, because subconsciously I understood how fragile his entire foundation was as a person, and as a partner. I couldn’t take care of both of us, I was only interested in taking care of myself. I had an enormous and daunting road ahead of me in the way of recovering from my assault, and I couldn’t have someone in my corner who I didn’t trust could be a pillar of strength for me in the way that I knew my sister and my friends would be. Walking away from that relationship was one of the best things that I’ve ever done, and until this moment, I’ve never looked back.

24/05/23

I’m watching my reflection in the mirror. Hair half wet, falling onto my face in ways that remind me of my twenty-year-old self. Strange and conflicting it is to feel both pride and envy for her. As though she was deprived of what I know now, what we know now, and yet had something that I do not currently possess. It is not tangible. It is vulnerability, and a striking courage to try. To keep trying. I wonder if she knew. Perhaps I too, have that courage, and I do not know it. What I do know, is what I desire. I’ve a longing to bury back into my bones, into myself, into home – me. Maybe if I dress like her I’ll be able to reach her. Tell her of the strength I’ve found. I think she would be proud, shocked. Think she’d smile and cry happy tears. To know we finally learnt. It feels like a life-altering learning. It’s kind of phenomenal to be in this position now. I know there’s another corner to turn, know it’s going to really hurt. But I actually can’t wait.

When I arrived at our next destination, everyone was littered about in the back room, with bodies continuously shuffling in and out of the booths to have a smoke, order more drinks, or make room for a newcomer. It’s the adult’s musical chairs: no one person can sit in the same spot for too long for fear of missing out on something that might be happening two to six metres away. It would have been strange if we hadn’t naturally progressed to a close proximity given the speed with which people were exchanging seats.
When we were finally sat together, we mutually dismissed the exchange of introductions – it wasn’t necessary despite us having never met in person. We talked with the familiarity of distant friends and bounced off of the other people around us. Simply put, it was very easy.

After a moderate chunk of time, we’d not only exchanged numbers, but we’d created a Spotify blend to determine how compatible our music tastes were. Hozier, Doja Cat, Kaytranada, Angie McMahon – not bad. We continued talking without the former contributions of the people who had been sitting with us, until I noticed that numbers were again dwindling in the venue. Time stands still for no one – we were moving onto the third and final stop of the evening: someone’s house whose name escaped me.

“I thiiiink I’m gonna head home” the physio said to me with a shred of uncertainty.

“Aw, really? No! You should come too!”

“Agh! Very tempting, but I shouldn’t, I have work in the morning”

Rats. I’d progressively worked up my flirting game, surpassing lukewarm and wasn’t ready for the back and forth to end. I was in a strappy black mini dress and black sharply pointed kitten heels – simple but effective – and hadn’t wanted the outfit to be neglected of more potential hours of flirtatious dallying.

“Are you sure?” I looked up at him, drawing my ‘sure’ out on the pavement outside of the bar before he let out a small groan of exasperation.

“No. Nooo, ugh, stop it” he smirked. “No, I’m gonna go home, I shouldn’t stay out”

“That’s fine, slightly disappointing but, very understandable”

There was a small gap in conversation, before he inched closer toward me.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

I felt my cheeks grow warm and my mouth form the shape of a shy smile as we maintained our eye contact, “Mhm”.

It was a very public display of affection, which typically I avoid, but with more cocktails, comes less inhibitions. It was a bloody good first kiss, I will admit.

I gently pulled away from him and felt my eyes dart either side of me to determine who had witnessed the kiss – a sobering experience. A few minutes later we hugged goodbye and as I made my way all of four steps to where my friend was standing, she asked, “ummmmm, excuse me, did you just kiss the physio!?”

“…yes”.
“Awww!”

We spent the next five days messaging back and forth, barely leaving any room for lulls in conversation with the exception of our respective working hours. Even then, we were still making time to pick up the dialogue where it had last left off.
His messaging style was similar to mine, short bursts of sporadic thoughts that were somehow still relevant to whatever we were discussing, with emojis littered throughout the text. It was endearing, not because it mirrored my own digital comms style, but because it was immediately obvious that this was something that he was excited about. It felt refreshing to maintain conversation with a man who didn’t feel it was necessary to conceal any of his emotions, or enthusiasm. It was something that drew me to him immediately – his innate ability to be vulnerable.

Together with our propensity for shit talking, we had also been chipping away at making plans to see each other again. He suggested a mid-week picnic and a walk at Mt. Lofty Botanic Gardens, and I felt grateful toward both the proposal to indulge in something wholesome, and his execution of making the plans.

The morning of, he picked me up and upon arrival at the gardens, we decided on the perfect picnic spot. We unfurled the rugs, turned on the speaker, and he began to empty the contents of his picnic basket out before me: chopped carrots, cucumber, an assortment of fruit, home-made babaganoush, cashews, olives, a bottle of chardonnay, cold water, and two glasses. All I brought was a blanket. But for what I lacked in picnic necessities, I like to think I made up for in excited energy.
About an hour into our scenic date, with Angie McMahon playing on repeat in the background, he asked me the dreaded question: “so what’s your family like?” No, please god, anything but that.
How can you politely tell a near-stranger that your family is in shambles without them asking further questions? I don’t think you can. Instead, I’ve learnt to simplify my response to this question with, ‘my parents aren’t together, I have two sisters, I’m the youngest’. Short, sharp, to the point, and usually only leaves room for questions about sibling dynamics as opposed to nuclear family dynamics. For the most part it worked, until he began to slowly walk me through his own family dynamics, and I was quickly learning that I wasn’t the only party who had endured a dysfunctional upbringing. It was tricky to navigate. On the one hand, was his very vulnerable and transparent self which I recognised myself in, but on the other was my desire to gently shut the conversation down before it steered into heavy, inappropriate-for-first-date territory.
I later discovered that he also has ADHD, and upon learning this, I saw another part of myself in him – the tendency to delve into topics, usually emotional, completely unfiltered without stopping to consider if the context is appropriate. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed the social mark on this one, and it is in large, part of the reason why I have implemented a rule to be tight-lipped on the subject of my family with new friends. Sob stories are reserved for intimate relationships, or Substack.

Aided by the space of the gardens, sun, and a tipple of chardonnay, I strategically and successfully side-stepped the family talk. We spent the remainder of the afternoon frolicking short distances to and from the rugs, snacking, hitting repeat on our favourite Angie songs, and smooching (when nobody was around). We had such an easy and fun afternoon, that I invited him back to mine after the picnic, and he stayed the night.
The next day, Amelia messaged me to gather intel about my first date with the physio, as is part of the girl code – not a morsel of information shall go undisclosed.

“Did you go on picnic? How is it!”

“We did yesterday!! it was so gorg”

“omg!!!! how was it xxxx”

“he packed wine, snacks, water, a speaker and made babaganoush. And picked me up!”

“Omg stop it. PICKED YOU UP. THE GENTLEMAN”

“And we came back here, kept chatting outside, bonked twice, he stayed over and we got some Vietnamese entrees and watched Schitt’s Creek. And then we bonked again this morning”.

“TORI”

“I feel very comfy with him, and I know he does too (cos he told me)”

“This makes me so happy! THREE BONKS”

“I feel so calm. I’m like this is weird, I hung out with a man and shagged him and let him sleep over and I didn’t panic about it today”

“The lack of anxious hyper vigilant response can only be a good sign!!”

“I think so!!”

Two days later, it was a Friday, and I saw the physio again for a brief outing, tagging along with him and his friends for some drinks in the city. I ended up running into some friends of my own, seeing the night grow increasingly social, as we flittered from conversations between ourselves, to others. Observing how he navigated socially and externally left me with only positive impressions of him. There wasn’t an ounce of smothering or any attempts at desperate clawing when one of us would leave the other’s side at the table for long periods of time. We’d simply plonk back down in our respective chairs and enthusiastically greet each other as though we hadn’t arrived together. When we eventually called it a night, I took both the physio and a burrito home with me.

That Sunday, I was driving to my sister’s house for my nephew’s first birthday, coffee in hand, belting Taylor Swift songs, and so distracted by my lingering crush that I forgot what was waiting for me when I arrived. Not only were my parents about to be in the same room as one another for the first time since they separated (years), but I was about to be in the same room as my mum, who I hadn’t spoken to since Boxing Day.
We’d had words – if you can even call it that. After so many years of enduring her habitual Christmas cruelties, I’ve learnt to keep the conversation to a minimum when she lashes out, despite years of repressed arguments that I keep to myself. Not even the shower’s walls have heard them, they just swim around in my head for weeks after she’s provoked me, and then I force myself to move on from them, from her. Typically, this coincides with the New Year, meaning that I can convince myself I’m another year older, wiser, and further away from her. As though I’m completely fine with this, as though my mother wound doesn’t grow deeper with every passing year that wedges more distance between us.

I skimmed over her last message to me whilst driving, an apology that my sister had forced out of her for both of our sakes and considered my options before sighing out loud to nobody but myself. I had hoped that with enough time, and enough messages from friends stacked on top of her lingering, unanswered apology, I could continue to ignore it. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s a tricky thing, to exist in a constant limbo of forgiving someone and holding your breath for the next blow. It’s a large reason why I keep so much distance between us, and why I now haven’t spoken to her since Easter, self-preservation. You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped, you’ll only hurt yourself in the process.
But still I had to call her, had to be the bigger person, if you can even call it that. Repeatedly forgiving her never feels like a step forward, only backward, and suddenly I’m a child again, smoothing out the creases so that she can continue acting as though there was never anything to conceal. The conversation lasted for all of five minutes despite both of us having the luxury of time on our hands.
When I arrived, everything was normal (our version of it), and we greeted each other with our usual mother-daughter act only decipherable to us. Drinks in hand, and quickly running out of conversation, she leant on her usual tactic reserved solely for me, “want to hop outside and have a smoke?” “sure”.
We stood side by side, exchanging pleasantries about the weather, not knowing what else we could possibly talk to one another about when she asked me, “so how’s the psychology degree?” “Oh” I said, “I’ve been studying social work…for…almost three years”. “Well!” she started, “maybe if you actually called me, I would know that”.“Mmmm. Anyway, I’ve deferred. I want to pursue writing, instead”. “Righto. Well…you always liked that. Remember when you had that poem published when you were little?” “Yeah, of course I do”.
We are strangers to each other.
I assume that she felt the same level of discomfort that I was experiencing, an amalgamation of hurt and years-long regret that neither one of us knows how to address, because she followed up with the only other topic of conversation that she trusts will relieve us of our inevitable stagnancy.
“So, any men on the scene?” “Actually” I said with an air of excitement, “there is!” I explained how we had met and described in small detail about the execution of the picnic and how sweet it was, skimming over details I knew she wouldn’t be interested in, or would somehow take offence to. Unsurprisingly, she scoffed. That’s the thing with my mum, I don’t think she wants me to be miserable (fingers crossed), but I have always suspected that my being alone has been a source of pleasure for her. A secret aid for her sore spot, finding relief in my seeming loneliness. As though it’s somehow derivative of her own singledom, as though she’s not flawed and can’t be held accountable for being on her own if her daughter is too. Her own flesh and blood.
“Hm” she responded, “well, they’re all shit, the lot of them”. Despite it being the response that I’d anticipated, I wasn’t any less deflated by it. I walked back inside wondering what it must be like to have the kind of relationship with your mum where you can talk, not just about relationships, but about anything. I found my cue to abandon the conversation, and later, the birthday. When I arrived home, the physio messaged me.
“tttttttttttoooooooooooorrrrriiiiiiiiiii”

“PPPHYSIO”

“Hello. I am at home. chilling tf oooout. still hanging with the fam?”

“Hello. Ooh when did you knock off? I have just gotten home, got outta there as soon as the first opportunity presented itself”

“hahaha that is fair enough! I knocked off at 3:45. happy days. ate brekky around 9:30 so I ate a bunch of hummus and bread before I left lol”

“Delicious. Both @ the knock off time and the snacks. My lunch was guacamole and a few pieces of roast chicken. Doesn’t feel right considering how much food there was”

“well!! what’re we gonna do about that!! some dinner perhaps?”

“Yes. Please.”

He came over, we had dinner, he stayed the night. I won’t bore you with the details because outside of that, there isn’t much to say. But the following morning, things took a turn for the strange/sad/weird.
I lived close to work, so I suggested we venture there for a (free) coffee before parting ways as I was headed to Melbourne for the week. We were sitting at the table exuding faux couple energy, talking comfortably, and sipping on our coffees, when out of nowhere the physio’s entire demeanour shifted from sprightly to incredibly solemn. It was as though a light had gone out. “I haven’t heard from my step-dad and that’s really weird because I usually always hear from him in the morning” he said fidgeting with his phone. “Oh, I’m sure everything is fine. Maybe he slept in? Maybe he knows you’re out and about and didn’t want to disturb you?” “No, it’s really strange. I hear from him every morning. I’ve sent him a text, but I haven’t heard anything. I just get worried… he’s got bad mental health…” he trailed off, before turning away from me. A moment of uncomfortable silence passed before the physio heard a notification on his phone. It was his step-dad, he told me. “Is everything ok?” I asked “Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine, he just didn’t have his phone on him”. “Are you ok?” “I just need a moment… I think I’m going to take a walk by myself if that’s ok” “Yeah, sure, of course, whatever you need to do”.

He wiped his eyes and removed himself from the table, leaving me wondering what on earth had just happened, and how a quick coffee had turned into repressed tears at a café.

As I sat on my own, I observed that the café was quickly filling up, and pre-empting the busy wave that was about to hit, I gathered my belongings and began my search for the physio outside. I eventually gave up, hovering at my car not knowing where he had gone, when a few moments later he approached me still looking completely distraught. I didn’t know what to make of it, I’d just wanted to have a coffee with him before I left Adelaide for the week. I asked him if he was ok, but all he offered was a handful of words and a limp, sad goodbye. I got in my car and felt immediately guilty.

Less than an hour later, I saw a text on my phone from the physio apologising, explaining to me that he can’t discuss these particular worries without having a strong emotional reaction. I reassured him that it really was ok, and before I realised, I was apologising for having ‘poked and prodded at the wrong time’. Hang on a minute, had I? poked and prodded? Or was I merely a witness to his echo chamber of voiced anxieties?

“you didn’t know so that’s okay” he told me “you didn’t know what direction that conversation was heading in. I should have tapped out earlier. I’m good now. Listening to some bangers and I’m cleaning and drinking beer. Life is good” It was 11:15am. “I definitely did not know the conversation was going to head in that direction, and I appreciate that it’s a really sensitive and hard topic to accidentally broach. If we ever start to head towards a conversation topic and it makes you feel ways, just let me know and I can divert”.

He ignored the message. Suddenly, I didn’t feel guilty, I felt perplexed. Not only had he instigated the conversation himself, pulling me into his unforeseen and inappropriate bubble of sad, but he had accepted my completely unnecessary apology, and then left me hanging. Not entirely confident in where I stood after the very sad coffee, I consulted in Jess, a close friend/roommate/psychologist who confirmed that it was in fact, bizarre behaviour. I spent the remainder of the day frantically packing and chronically puzzled.

The week away in Melbourne helped, (said the wife who had been married for a decade, not the woman who had been dating a man for a fortnight). We organically stepped back into our regular rhythm of messaging, sending frequent photos and updates as each of our days progressed. We even talked on the phone, which is so far outside of my comfort zone, I considered that it could only be a good sign. Look at me! Phoning someone! This crush is real and safe! We made plans to see each other the night that I got back to Adelaide, but coming off of minimal sleep, a delayed flight, a Taylor Swift concert, and the stress of transit that becomes a whole-body experience (despite the short distance), I knew better than to proceed. I have a habit of convincing myself that if I can’t be 100% on, then nobody will enjoy my company, particularly men. I know it’s unfounded and not rooted in any real logic, but my experiences of men getting bored with me very quickly has seen me develop a mechanism whereby if I don’t feel that I can be my full self, I’ll isolate to avoid repeating conversations in my head, later kicking myself for what I did or didn’t say, or how I did or didn’t behave.
He touched base in the afternoon to confirm the time as he was coming from work, and I explained to him that I was regretfully too tired to proceed with our plans, to which he was very understanding. I laid in my bed for all of ten minutes before quickly deciding, to hell with it! this man likes me! this man might even like me when I’m tired and not very charismatic! I called him and without explaining my honest reasons for cancelling, asked if he would still like to come around. I don’t know if it’s rational, but I really was expecting him to say, I’m turning the car around, I’ll see you soon! And then I would remain wrapped in my sheets, tired, but giddy at the prospect of him inching closer toward me as the minutes rolled over. Womp womp. He told me that I had made my bed, and I should lie in it. The irony is, that I already was.
When we ended the call, I turned both my phone and my body face down, once more kicking myself for the things that I had said, and the ways that I’d behaved. I felt like a dejected, sleep deprived, loser.

Following a surprisingly good night’s sleep considering the anxiety hole I’d cornered myself into, I decided to refrain from exposing him and his unnecessary comment to anyone in close proximity to me. I’d once more convinced myself that my inability to emotionally regulate and side-step my insecurities was solely a ‘me’ problem. GET A GRIP, I told myself. We continued messaging over the weekend and at his suggestion, made plans to see each other for a beach sunset on Monday evening. The same day that I had a tarot reading with my favourite (only) psychic booked in. If only she could have shed a slither of light onto what was to come.

Basking in the remnants of sun at Henley Beach together on our towels, I reached for the bottle of wine we had purchased when I spied the cups that he had brought. They were tiny, stainless steel, coloured camping cups that came in their own equally small, zipped neoprene bag.

Facing him on my side, I said, “these are cool, where did you get them?”

He sat looking out to sea with his knees up to his chin explaining that the cups belong to his mum, that his parents were first generation immigrants and had a hard time getting rid of unused belongings. He looked devastated, and I observed as he brought his fingers underneath the gap in his sunglasses to wipe away tears. I was perplexed, again. I’d just wanted to know where he got the cups from. I tried my best to be understanding but the entire thing felt so strange considering that he’d planned the evening and brought the drinking vessels. It felt almost pre-ordained.
I attempted to steer the conversation away into something more appropriate for a fourth date, deciding to lean on the tarot reading that I’d had done just hours before. I was animatedly sharing small details, offering anecdotes, and describing this woman’s brilliant demeanour when I realised that everything that I was saying was falling onto deaf ears. Still sitting upright with his body facing toward the ocean, he dismissed everything that I’d said and instead began talking about something trivial and completely unrelated. And then I noticed as he wiped his eyes dry again. “Are you… are you ok?” I asked. “Yeah… I’m just… I’m just feeling a lot tonight”. It all felt so reminiscent of young adulthood, bordering on the early teenage years, the same way that you’d post a Facebook status with lyrics to a sad song waiting for someone to ask you what was going on. Except I refused to bite any further than asking after his general and immediate well-being. There’s a time, a place, and more importantly, a person. And a date on the beach with a woman you’re getting to know hardly meets the criteria for any of those three things. Despite the general air of discomfort and our repeated swings and misses, the night, along with us, gradually found a steady pace. We spent the remainder of the evening laying on our backs counting stars as they slowly began to appear in the sky before it got too dark, and we packed up our belongings. Once we were back at mine and de-sanded, we crawled into my bed to continue watching Schitt’s Creek together. We were cuddling with my laptop cradled in the space between our legs when, as Meryl Streep in Mama Mia would write, one thing led to another and…“I’m getting close” he said. “Not yet” I responded. At the age of twenty-eight, I’d finally found my voice in the one place I’d never seem able to previously reach it – the bedroom. A few minutes later, his paced had slowed to a stop, and then I heard him say my name. The way it escaped his mouth was drawn out, light, song-like. It held similar inflections to that of admonishing a child with more jest than frustration, “tooooriiii”, he laughed before telling me that he had finished. We weren’t using a condom. My hands still pressed against his shoulders, I stared at his chest in silence, unable to tilt my face up to look at his. I froze momentarily before lifting myself off of him and grabbing my towel hanging from the door of my wardrobe.
I can’t remember if he said anything to me, but with my back turned to him I stepped into the bathroom and softly shut the door. I stepped into the shower, turned the water on and stared at the tiles before crouching down to my knees and biting down on my fist – I didn’t want him to hear me crying. I don’t know how long I was in the shower for, but I’d hoped that when I returned to my room he would be gone. I didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to utter a word to him. But when I entered my room again, he was still there. “Do you want me to go?” he asked coyly. “Yes. I want to be alone” I spoke to the carpet.

I didn’t know where to put myself, which is a strange feeling, being uncomfortable in the one over familiar place of comfort: your own bedroom. I sat on the edge of my bed, still wrapped in my towel, and stared into my wardrobe as he gathered his belongings.
When I heard the front door close behind him my body emitted loud, heaving howls. I didn’t have a moment to determine if it was a rational response before releasing the sobs I’d tried to contain in the shower. A part of me felt like I’d overreacted, that I was being unnecessarily dramatic. Was I supposed to laugh it off with him? Wave the violation of my consent away with an air of, ‘oh well!’ or ‘whoopsie daisy!’ or ‘shit happens!’. The way he’d giggled afterward had certainly made it seem that way. But there was another, bigger part of me that felt a year-old trauma that I’d tried to manage privately suddenly push its way through to the surface. It wasn’t that the experiences mirrored each other, but one got tangled up in the other, and I wondered if I would ever feel safe with a man again. I wanted to scream and vanish at the same time. I wanted the ability to pick at the fabric of time. I wanted to undo it all. Bodies do keep scores, down to excruciatingly finite details.

Mid-heave, I heard the handle to my bedroom door twist open. It was Jess. She covered the space between the doorway and my bedroom in the blink of an eye and wrapped me in the kind of hug that enveloped my entire body. “Shhhh” she cooed, “just breathe, just breathe, you’re ok, just breathe”. The immediacy of her comfort was like controlling a faucet – her hand rubbing my back seeing my breath quicken before slowing to an almost normal pace. Safe, safe, safe, I am safe here with her.

Minutes later, when I gently peeled myself out of her embrace, she asked me what had happened. “Oh, Tori. I’m so sorry. That’s so wildly irresponsible of him, and the last thing you needed”. I blew my nose into the tissues that appeared seemingly out of the nowhere and she didn’t leave my side for thirty minutes. It was 2 o’clock in the morning. No matter the time or the place, she is my person.

Before I fell into a deep, defeated sleep, I unlocked my phone to see that the physio had messaged me. “I locked the door on my way out. I never meant to do that to you tori. I am so sorry”. I ignored it. It’s not that I believed that the apology was insincere, it was that the damage was already done. He had both laughed and failed to apologise until he could do so behind the wall of his phone. The entire thing felt shockingly juvenile, and I can hazard a guess that had I responded differently, he might never have been forced to take a step back to understand the gravity of the situation. But did he?

A few weeks after the incident, I was talking to our mutual friend on the phone who told me that she had recently ran into him. “I just pretended I didn’t know anything when he brought you up, but then he walked me through everything. And… he said that it only happened because you were pinning him down”. Pinning him down. His six-foot something body to my five-foot frame. Pinning him down. “…Are you…fucking kidding me?” I sprang up from my cross-legged position on the floor and stood frozen. How many people had he shared this blatantly misinformed version of events with, in an effort to absolve himself? I’m at an age, and a place in my life where I do finally care much less about what people think of me, but that’s hardly the point. He had finessed the details of the experience to convince himself that this was not his burden to shoulder. Twisting the narrative and wiping his hands clean to the detriment of himself, not solely because of this chapter, but because he had pardoned himself from taking accountability, despite previously apologising for his actions. It’s another tired story of a man missing the opportunity to take responsibility to better himself and his ability to empathise. It is both for a lack of wanting, and a lack of trying, and for us as women, it is dire; how quickly a horror story for us can become their version of a mocked, tall tale. How quickly we are willing to look the other way for fear of what they might say, think, do. How devastating the effects are when we feel forced to be meek, silent, complacent women. The kind who can laugh off a man finishing inside of her as though she’ll face no consequences for it. As though she won’t be burdened by the physical, emotional, and financial responsibility of her body, that he saw as just that – a body. I am done with biting my tongue for fear of social repercussions – instead, I will bite the hand that does not feed me.

***

In the lead up to writing this piece, I felt stuck trying to determine if it was worth it, if I could do it. Part of me felt apprehensive about taking all of this and putting it under the microscope, fearing that it would do more harm than good. I wasn’t fearful of the ramifications if he potentially read it, I was more concerned that I’d finish this piece and be left to suture old wounds that he, and others left, that I was choosing to scratch at. Would it be worth it? What was I trying to achieve? When I did decide on proceeding with it, I still didn’t want to go near it. I’d open my laptop and lightly drum my fingers on the keyboard, not actually putting any words down. I’d stare into space and try to piece the timeline back together, only to find an excuse to walk away from my desk. I started feeling angry, again, not just at him, but at so many of them for all that they had taken from me in one way or another. For all of the sleepless nights and self-deprecating thought spirals, for all of the ways that they had made me feel less human, and more shameful, simply for being a woman who had wanted. And then, on my third consecutive day of tentative writing attempts, a friend phoned me with a horror story that echoed this very one. Another woman. Another friend. Another violation of consent. When we later hung up, I marched back to my desk and shut the door, determinedly remembering myself and my intentions for this entire project. Catharsis, healing, a reclamation of power – absolutely – but it’s so much more than that. As I said to the woman who messaged me about the pilot after I’d updated the chapter, I wrote this for me as much as I wrote it for you. With each chapter that I share, I receive more messages from women that I used to know, women who are still in my life, and women that I’ve never met. I am finding hope there, in those small interactions, that all of this, will not have been for nothing.

These women turned housemates and later, turned friends, were always so welcoming toward me. Any time they were hosting something at our house, they would make every effort to let me know that I was more than welcome to participate, and more often than not, I did.
Over time I created friendships with both of them, but I was naturally drawn to and felt closer to one more than the other. She was smart, and funny, and I looked forward to our kitchen debriefs and sporadic glasses of wine whenever our paths crossed after work or on weekends.

I remember hearing the painter’s name at home, first in passing, and then in direct conversation. He didn’t live in Adelaide, in fact, he lived in France, but he had a brief homecoming planned and my house mate was beyond excited for his short-lived return.
The way she would talk about him was sweet, and honest, and the handful of anecdotes she’d shared with me painted him in a similar light to way that I perceived her – charismatic, amusing, and never one to shy away from a good time. They’d been best friends for years, and despite the distance, it seemed that they had managed to sustain and nurture their friendship with a natural kind of ease. At this point, I’d met and spent some time with so many of my house mates’ friends, but after what had been shared with me, I was particularly excited to meet the infamous painter who lived overseas.

I don’t remember our first interaction, or being introduced to each other, but I remember sitting in our backyard in a small group and the ways my eyes would continuously find his. It didn’t necessarily feel flirty, or horny, I knew he had a girlfriend, but there was just something about him that felt really enticing. My house mate was right, he was funny, and at the time, his humour felt refreshing because it wasn’t in a ‘steal the spotlight, bro-ey’ kind of way; it was silly, and quick. I was impressed.

The first outing that I can recall with him involved both of my house mates, and a large handful of their friends. We had gone out for drinks somewhere, but as the evening progressed, the numbers dwindled and eventually it was just the three of us. We were drunk, tone-deaf, and the energy between all of us was charged – we simply had to go to karaoke.
Sitting at the table, skimming through the thick binder of songs to choose from, I felt something shift. I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly the painter and I had jumped from goofy/silly, to flirty/horny. I felt his leg brush up against mine under the table and willed myself to keep it together, constantly reminding myself of the girlfriend who was very, very far away. For the rest of the evening, I managed to keep my hands to myself, but failed to have any self-control when it came to the increasingly intense eye contact we were sharing. Fuck.

My house mate, having eyes and sitting in front of us, immediately suspected that there was potential foul play at hand. But instead of reprimanding either one of us, she seemed to almost be encouraging the unchastised unity, later telling me in private, “nobody likes his girlfriend anyway!” Don’t tell me that!!

The next time I hung out with my house mate, and the painter, we went out for dinner at Ying Chow on Gouger Street. There was still an energy between the painter and I, but after having stern words with myself, I was willing the electricity to vanish. If you let yourself become that woman, you mightn’t ever forgive yourself.
For the most part, it worked, and I had the rare opportunity to feel comfortable to be myself around a man that I was sexually attracted to. Being twenty-three, it was something that I hadn’t really experienced before, letting myself exist in full in front of a man because I didn’t need any version of his approval, or attraction toward me. It might sound silly, but I remember that being an incredibly liberating moment for me. I didn’t really have any male friends, and it felt like a step in the direction of becoming a more self-actualised version of myself. One who could create and maintain friendships with people of the opposite sex, without vying for their attention.

The next time I saw him however, it seemed that booze had gotten the better of me. It had been another big and silly night of drinking that involved a lot of their friends, and when we all made it back to our house, it seemed that all of my short-lived ideas about being morally sound and living outside of the male gaze disintegrated. It didn’t help that my roommate was encouraging it, or that he wasn’t making any effort to cease flirting with me. I was handed two green-lights, and the only thing that stopped us from doing anything, was a sudden sobered decision from his end. He slept on a single armchair that night, and I’m perpetually grateful that he did.
The next morning, a handful of us in our hungover stupor made our way to Villi’s for a shared breakfast of hot chips and gravy. There was minimal talking, maximum grunting, and a lot of bodies slumped in seats. My house mate stole a bowl, and that’s the last time I remember seeing the painter before he flew back to France.

A little more than a year later, my house mate turned friend got a job in Melbourne and moved out. Time continued to pass, and as the distance between her and I grew larger, there was nothing left to remind me about him, and our brief ‘will they, won’t they’ experience. From what I had gathered, The painter didn’t use social media, and without that visceral prompt being there, I eventually forgot that he even existed. Until earlier this year.

In January I was absentmindedly scrolling through Tinder, barely taking notice of the people that I was swiping between when I was suddenly stopped in my tracks. After all of these years, there he was. I took a swift walk down memory lane and was stunned that I’d neglected to think of him in such a large space of time. It was the painter, and he was so beautiful, and how could I have possibly forgotten about him? I felt my body grow warm with a fond breed of nostalgia and matched with him before sending a screenshot to my old house mate.

“Omg” she replied,

“DATE THE PAINTER. MY DREAMS”.

“Hahahaha, your dreams for you or me” I asked her.

“Maybe both our dreams”

“So beautiful”.

“I forgot all about sweet the painter”

“That’s the problem w someone being permanently incognito”.

“He is such a good boy”

“Please report back!!”.

The painter and I gave each other our brief synopsise of the previous four years of our lives, dancing around the question marks dangling from his long-term relationship. What had happened? Were they still together, but in an open relationship? Were they taking a break? Had he moved back to Adelaide? I only asked about the latter, and then suddenly his profile vanished. Hm. Weird. Oh well. I assumed that they had broken up, but that he had realised Tinder was both a waste of time, and not a viable choice in terms of healing. I put it to bed, only for him to reappear weeks later in my Instagram messages with an apology for disappearing.
The painter explained to me that he hadn’t been doing so well and didn’t want to give the wrong impression, that he still wanted to see me. Having spent large periods of my life experiencing bouts of poor mental health, I was sympathetic to the cause and completely understanding. I reassured him that it was absolutely fine for him to have slipped back into the ether, and that I would really like to see him too.

The anticipation I felt before our first date didn’t have the same anxious layer of nerves I was so used to experiencing before meeting somebody. I was genuinely excited to get to see him again, and I was so curious about our previous chemistry. After all of the years and space between us, I knew that there was a likelihood of it being nothing more than a distant memory. But regardless, I entered into the evening feeling optimistic towards both of the potential outcomes. It was the painter, after all; chemistry or no chemistry, I knew I’d just enjoy his company.

I arrived at La Buvette before him and was shown to a small table outside on the footpath adjacent to the venue. I don’t like being the first to arrive. It’s not as though I like to make grand entrances, I just never know what to do with myself when someone else’s ETA is hanging in the air because I’m so used to being late. But I wasn’t waiting for long and I eventually spotted the outline of his body down the street, walking toward the table.
I jumped out of my seat and onto the middle of the footpath, feeling a grin stretch across my face. We were smiling and waving at each other before falling into a hug that given the circumstances, didn’t feel unnatural, it just felt nice.
When we were sat across from each other, it was hard not to study his face. I was both looking for any obvious signs of change and trying to read his facial expressions, but all I could think to myself was, he’s still so gorgeous. I suddenly felt self-conscious. What did my outfit say? Was I wearing too much make up? Did he think I looked different? I forcibly shook my doubt off, remembering that in the space of four years, I had changed, and I had welcomed it.

The further we fell into conversation, the more at ease I was noticing him becoming.

“I’m a bit nervous actually” he told me.

“Really??”

I was surprised, until I realised that I’d been experiencing an ADHD hyperactive episode and had been talking at a million miles an hour with extreme enthusiasm and hand gestures to match. Ohhh. I sipped on my drink and forced myself to bite my tongue. And maybe it helped because the next thing I knew, he was telling me that his Tinder escapades had had a single motive.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way” he laughed, “but I actually got Tinder to try and find you”.

“Bullshit!” I laughed with him, “no you didn’t”.

“I did! I tried to follow you on Instagram, but you left me hanging!! So, I went on Tinder, and I was hoping I would find you on there, which was lucky”.

“I didn’t leave you hanging! I just didn’t see your follow request!”

I felt flattered, and surprised, and at no point did I consider why he had wanted to find me outside of the simple fact that in the four years we hadn’t spoken, he had thought about me. How often? I couldn’t say, but considering that I’d forgotten he existed, and he was sleuthing the internet for me years later, I took it as a sincere expression of interest.

The night progressed quickly, and I was remembering how well we got on with one another, and how good it felt to be properly silly with a man. It was the perfect amalgamation of playing present time catch up and respectively revisiting the past. We were discussing the juxtaposition of our experiences – my seeming perpetual singledom, and his seven-year relationship on the other side of the world. I told him that I couldn’t imagine what it must feel like, to be with someone for such a long stretch of time, having been on my own for so long and having gotten to a place where it didn’t feel bad, or scary anymore. He talked me through the demise of his long-term relationship and hinted at feelings of hurt and betrayal.

When we left the venue filled up on gluten-free toast, a bottle of wine, and hours long conversation, he took me back to my house. I hadn’t slipped into my non-verbal state that I often experience after a social outing and decided that I wasn’t ready for the night to be over – I was having too much fun. I invited him in for a drink, and a game of ‘silent Jenga’.

“What’s silent Jenga?”

“Oh, it’s just regular Jenga, but we have to be quiet because my room mates are upstairs sleeping”.

We didn’t make it through the game, but we did make it to the couch. And any questions I had surrounding what was left of our untouched chemistry were quickly answered.
It was messy, but messy in the sense of being hurried and horny and on a leather couch. Like when two people are fighting against a time constraint that doesn’t exist and you can’t possibly get your clothes off, and your bodies touching fast enough.
He didn’t stay the night, and I didn’t want or expect him to. I’d finally reached the point in the evening where I needed to be alone, but that didn’t take away from any of our interactions, physical or otherwise. I closed the door behind him and thought, shit, that was actually a really nice night.
The next time we saw each other was more than a month later. And I know what you’re thinking, but it really was a matter of bad timing.

Having recently moved back to Adelaide after years of being away and having his friends spread out across the country, the painter was doing what any normal person would be – making up for lost time and flooding his social calendar. We’d tried to orchestrate another date, but between his trip to the Grampians, and Sydney, and me doing whatever the hell I was doing, it just didn’t work. I wasn’t concerned though, this wasn’t a stranger, it was the painter, and despite having had a handful of interactions with him, I understood that I didn’t need to be concerned about him vanishing into thin air. Our history and previous mutual friends had birthed a reciprocal respect for one another. Neither of us were going anywhere, it was just a matter of being patient.

Our second date was supposed to be a quick drink at Hellbound, followed by a movie at the French Film Festival that he had purchased us tickets for.
We never made it to the film. Within the ten-minute window remaining to make it on time, we decided mutually to stay as we were. We sat in the dark corner and talked for hours, dancing our way back to the table after quick trips to the toilet, referencing Ru Paul, cackling, and going strongly against my rules toward PDA.

At some point in the night, we somehow organically broached the topic of camping when I exclaimed,

“Camping! We should go camping!”

“Really? You’d want to go camping with me?”

“Yes, are you kidding? We would have so much fun”

It was a Thursday night, and it appeared that we both had enough free time over the weekend to actually make it happen, at least for one night. We began to write a list of the items we would need, which is actually still in my phone. (Who clears notes? Nobody).

· swag

· bacon and eggs

· speaker

· gluten free bread

· nuttelex

· cups

· bed sheet

· utensils/plate etc

· plum wine from Japan

· toilet paper

· water

· pillow

· board games

“You would share your plum wine from Japan with me?” I asked him, as though he’d just offered to give me an organ if I ever needed one.

“Of course, I would share my plum wine with you!”

We left Hellbound in tow with the anticipation of our camping plans and went back to mine. He stayed the night, and on that occasion, I had both wanted and expected him to. We clocked three hours of sleep.

The next day, the painter messaged me apologising for being the bearer of bad news – his mum was travelling to the Philippines, and they were having a family dinner; camping was off of the table. Was I disappointed? Of course, but I couldn’t do anything about it, nor was I entitled to feel anything other than a little disheartened. I knew he was heading to Bali the following week, and that it would be another small stretch of time before we would see each other again. But again, I wasn’t anxious, and I wasn’t concerned. In my mind, the space and time could only be a good thing; there was obviously something between us, but I was cognisant that he was still processing his breakup, and likely would be for some time. I wasn’t in any kind of a rush to make something happen; for one of the first times in my life I felt secure in the slow burn, it was suiting me just fine.

Another month passed and, in that time, he’d completed a round trip to Bali, fallen ill, we’d tried and failed to make plans, I was working, and studying, and I’d been announced as a finalist for the RUSSH Literary Showcase. It felt good to acknowledge that I was at a place in my life where I was both carving out a path for myself, and not getting caught up in any potential mixed dating signals or woes. It wasn’t as though I had a ‘take or leave it’ attitude towards him, I was very much interested, I just wasn’t going to let myself experience another landslide of confused feelings if it wasn’t warranted.

We eventually found time to see each other again, and somehow it was suddenly April. I remember getting ready and feeling unusually nervous. What is that? What’s that about? I tried to sit with it for a moment and get to the root of it, but I couldn’t understand where the feeling was coming from given that I’d only been experiencing excitement and anticipation before our previous dates. It was unsettling, but I forced myself to try and let go of it.

That evening we did our usual shtick, galivanting around the city, drinking up each other’s company and simply having a really silly, and very lovely time together. We were quoting Bridesmaids and trying to remember the lyrics to Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ and referencing Ru Paul (again) as we hopped from venue to venue. There was even a moment where we were strolling down Rundle Street arm in arm singing god knows what song. It was my pop-culture wet-dream. At the crux of every outing with him, was this fun and flirty energy that we created together just be being around each other, and I loved it.

When we’d gotten over our frolicking, we again ended up back at my house where we later decided to revisit Villi’s together, sans the petty theft. We ordered a bowl of hot chips and gravy, and when we’d made it more than halfway through the bowl, I became hyper aware of my selfish hot-chip-eating habits.

“Sorry, I keep eating all of the good chips, two at a time”.

“Two at a time? That’s ok, you can always have the good hot chips”.

I didn’t say anything, but I smiled at his statement. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Back at mine (again), and after a fun romp in the sheets (we fell off of the bed), I realised that for all of the talking we’d done that night, I’d failed to ask him about Bali.

“Oh my god, sorry, I haven’t even asked you about your trip! Tell me everything”

He was showing me pictures on his phone from his week away when he stopped at a series of images his friend had taken of him, trying to get a gecko to jump into his mouth. (Writing this out now, it doesn’t sound very funny, but it actually was, and you’ll just have to take my word for it). He stopped on the last image of the gecko finally in his mouth and said,

“Yeah, that one’s great. I should put it on my Tinder profile”.

Oh. Ohhhh. In that moment, to put it plainly, I felt quite stupid, and very naïve. I felt myself retreat inwards, going quiet as I tried to debate quickly and internally what he’d said and how I was responding to it. I didn’t know where I exactly stood, but it didn’t feel good. Either way, I tried to muster up some bravado and pretend like I hadn’t been in this exact scenario before, in this exact room, and that I was completely unaffected by it. (Looking back on this now, I don’t regret the way that I behaved in trying to save face, I wasn’t trying to be any version of a ‘cool girl’, I think it was a matter of self-preservation.)

I think the painter sensed my apprehension towards his comment, because a few moments later, he asked if I was still ‘on the apps’. I couldn’t tell if he’d regretted what he’d said, or if he was just trying to test the waters. I told him that I wasn’t (the truth), without providing an explanation before jumping into a delicate tease of,

“So, when you said you’d gotten Tinder for the sole purpose of looking for me, was that just because you wanted to shag me?” I intentionally threw in a light laugh (because confronting men in your bedroom in the late hours of the night after you’ve slept together is deeply uncomfortable).

“Well, after Bec (not her real name) and I decided to make our relationship open, and she started dating someone else, and I was thinking about coming back to Adelaide, I thought about people who I’d liked… and who’d liked me too, and I thought of you. So, like yeah, initially I guess that’s what it was, but it’s not that now”.

I spent the next twenty-four hours doing what I do best, dissecting my feelings from both a very personal and a very objective point of view, weighing the scales of what I want vs. what is good for me. I could acknowledge that we hadn’t had ‘the conversation’, but it was difficult for me to swallow the idea that his initial pursuit had been nothing more than my being a physical endeavour for him. I know I didn’t know him that well, but did I expect more from him? Of course, I did. I resented being used as an emotional placeholder for him, just as I resent any man who uses sex as a means for avoiding processing their pain or feelings. As I’ve gotten older, that notion makes so little sense to me, and I struggle to understand how other people don’t realise how counterintuitive it is.

But was my inner romantic willing to listen to total logic? Not quite.
The next week, with the painter’s 30^th birthday impending, I was willing to give it one final crack. I messaged and asked if he would like to grab a celebratory drink, but he was busy with friends, and asked if the following week would suit. It didn’t sit right with me. Not that he was already occupied on his birthday weekend, which is completely reasonable, but it was the vague ‘sometime next week’ response that tipped the scales out of his favour. Pick a day, it’s not difficult.

Despite knowing that I was done, and that it wasn’t worth putting myself through another likely scenario of pretend partner/placeholder/void filler, I sent him well wishes on his birthday. I didn’t not like the man; I just didn’t love his intentions, and at the time it didn’t feel necessary to explicitly say, ‘thanks, but no thanks’. We sent a tiny handful of messages back and forth, and the following week, the painter tried to hit me up again. I didn’t respond.

Another week later (we’re now in May), I was announced as one of the winners of the Reader’s choice for the RUSSH Literary Showcase, and the painter sent me a message to congratulate me.

“Congratulations Tori!!!!! you earned this without a doubt. I’m so glad they’ve realised the excellence that you possess. I understand that u haven’t responded and I apologise encore for being a poor friend. Thus I’m still proud of u and really hope you’re proud of her, and you”.

It was a nice message, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was torn between leaving it completely alone, responding with a succinct version of thanks, or gently calling him out for his behaviour. I left it alone for ten days before I decided on the latter.

“Thanks painter, I appreciate the message and your apology. Don’t want you to be under the impression that my lapse in response is indicative of any bad blood. I had surgery Monday and have been recovering. Also – not reprimanding you, but please in future consider other people and their feelings when you use them as a bandaid for your own. It was admittedly triggering for me, to feel like I was just a woman you were using to help aid your wounds with Bec”.

“You were not someone I was using as a band aid to heal from my previous partner. I have been enjoying our time together and I suppose we just didn’t talk enough about how we felt or what we’ve wanted. I was under the impression that you didn’t want anything serious, as you stated on our first date that you were feeling like you were enjoying the “solo” version of yourself after your last relationship. And I coming off the back of a 7 year one, am not looking for anything too serious also. I acknowledge how I’ve made you feel and regret the way I’ve gone about all this. I’m sorry for misunderstanding and making you feel misused or exploited, that was never my intention. I hope you’re recovering well from your surgery”.

Revisiting all of this at length, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t still feel torn about my entire experience with the painter. I don’t believe that he is a bad person, or that his intentions were to be cruel, or exploitative, but I do know that he underestimated my personhood and neglected to consider the repercussions I’d face in being deemed the ‘fun, non-committal, good time’ girl that he met four years ago.
It’s near impossible to shed all of my experiences with men whereby I have been used for the sole purpose of ‘fun’, and it’s not and never was the painter’s responsibility to know or understand that when I never told him. But it was his responsibility to acknowledge his own motives and consider how they would affect me as a person completely separate to him and his experiences.

I never tried to give the impression that I was looking for a fling, or uncommitted fun. I was, for the first time in years, properly enjoying myself in the company of a man and finally feeling comfortable enough to be myself, in all of my unbridled joy.
Just once, I’d like for who I am, as a fun person, to not be misinterpreted as a fun time.

It had been at least three weeks of stunted communication before we had finally planned a date. Was I particularly taken by his profile? Not really. His pictures were blurry, his prompts were lacking in wit, and the conversation? Well, I never really gave him a chance (I’ll wear that). But given that my type has historically been ‘handsome but awful’, I thought I’d step out of my comfort zone and try on a new shade of man: a fuzzy fireman, to be more accurate.

The fireman decided on a Mexican restaurant that I hadn’t been to before, and I immediately regretted my choice of dinner the two previous nights: homemade tacos. No matter, I thought to myself, mine would probably taste like unseasoned cardboard in comparison, and I get to try a new venue I might not have otherwise come across. Two birds, one restaurant etc. etc.

Despite my habit of getting Ubers for evening dates and preparing for the night to take me anywhere, I decided to drive on this occasion. The venue was close enough to my house that was the night going to end in fun debauchery, getting my car the following day wouldn’t be a headache. But something in my gut told me I wasn’t to be concerned about the latter.

We arrived at the same time, another unusual circumstance that I wasn’t used to (I’m not a strong manager of my time) or prepared for. Given that we’d had so little communication with each other in the days leading up to the date, it immediately felt awkward, and a little bit forced. But I wasn’t too concerned, it was a first date, and we were trying to warm up before we’d even had the opportunity to sit down and face one another.
Lining up behind other patrons waiting to be seated, we fell into the habitual and reciprocal questions, asking one another how our days had been and what we had filled them with. I was trying to answer his questions, but my voice felt almost muted, and it was too early for the venue to be busy yet.
By the time we eventually sat down, I found myself immediately hiding behind the menu, leaning on the separate margarita list as a means for sustaining conversation.
Is it me? I found myself thinking, am I being weird? am I off tonight?

After deciding on our respective margarita’s, a rite of passage for a Mexican restaurant, the fireman asked me if I would like to take a walk after dinner.
“Or we could get an iced cream? Or whatever?”

My good man, we have not even ordered food yet, what is the rush?

“Yeah! Maybe!” I responded with faux enthusiasm.

The further we fell into pre-dinner conversation, the further I fell out of it. By no means was I being rude, or dismissive, I really was exerting a lot of energy to attempt to sustain the conversation, but it felt so stagnant that it was bordering uncomfortable.

Before our food had arrived, the fireman asked me what my upcoming week was looking like, and what my work roster was like.
“Oh, I actually don’t get my roster until Sunday evenings. The company I work for are really disorganised, but I had a job interview today and it went really well! I’m pretty certain I got it”. I told him.

“You should come and work out of the mines like me, yeah, they hire heaps of people, you could be a cleaner. It pays so well”.

Huh? Did I just have an imaginary conversation with myself in my head?

I was so confused at this point, that I didn’t know how to respond. What part of my sentence had he decidedly not listened to? And what about me screamed, I would love to be employed by the same mining company you work for, and deep clean apartments that men have slept in?
Thankfully, I was saved by the arrival of our food, but the immediacy which he was operating with had my stomach playing tricks on me. I only made it through one of my pork tacos before admitting defeat.

“I have no idea what’s going on with me tonight, but apparently I don’t have much of an appetite, do you want my other taco? I’m going to duck to the bathroom”.

“Yeah sure”.

In the bathroom, I suddenly felt exhausted. It was as though my entire body was rejecting the very notion of the evening, which was growing more rushed, and more confusing by the minute. Upon my return to the table, he was finishing the last bite of my taco I had offered him.

“How was it?” I asked with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as I sat back down.

“Yeah, I don’t really eat pork”.

“Oh, but…wait what? You just ate a pork taco”.

“Yeah, nah, I just prefer fish. Like catching it on the boat, and cooking it up, it’s so nice”.
This man was in his own world, and I felt like an unpaid extra.
At this point I was desperate for things to grab onto for conversation’s sake, so I greased up my hands and went against my better judgement; I latched onto the boat.

“You should come out with me one day!”.

Nooooo! Not again!

“Mmmmm” I meekly offered. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

The fireman must have taken this as some version of an affirmative, because before I knew it, he was mapping out the rest of his year with me. Boat trips, Sunday market adventures, margaritas on the beach, seeing the new Gladiator. I felt like someone had pressed the fast forward button, and I had missed integral parts of our conversation where I had alluded to being interested in any kind of a future with him. What is happening!?

“Actually” he began, “did you want to watch the original Gladiator tonight?”

“Oh…nah” I said, “not tonight”.

“Another time! So, do you live far from here?”

“I’m actually only a five-minute drive away, very handy”.

“Oh, you could’ve walked here!”

“Yeah” I said, “I mean if it wasn’t night-time”.

He stared at me blankly.

“Small woman, walking alone at night?” I prompted, “I wouldn’t really feel safe doing that”.

“Yeah” he said, “I don’t get that”.

I thought my brain was going to fall out of my skull. It genuinely felt like I was experiencing a lucid dream, except I couldn’t force myself to pinch my arm and wake myself up. I wanted to run out of the venue screaming, but that wasn’t an option. Instead, I called it a night, rejecting his proposition for another drink, yawning for extra effect.

When we walked out of the restaurant, he pulled me in for a hug, and I patted his back like a new colleague. I felt like I belonged in a sit-com.

“See you soon!” he said,

“Mmmmm” I offered again.

I thought the night was over, and that I was free from his intentional naivety, but the fireman latched onto my fingers, and pulled me in for another hug. I gripped onto my keys before releasing myself and power-walked the short distance to my car.

When I got home, I felt simultaneously restless, and exhausted. I was tossing and turning with the weight of what I thought was disappointment, but the longer I sat with it, the more out of place it felt. Was it because it was my third strike out? Was it the boat? Was it the manifestation of another ‘we’ man? What was it about this date that nearly put me to sleep, that was keeping me up?
It wasn’t until two am that I realised I wasn’t disappointed; I was completely bewildered.

Not only had the fireman dismissed me multiple times throughout the evening, contorting what I said to fit to his internal brief – one I’ll never know or understand – but he couldn’t comprehend why I, as a woman, wouldn’t want to walk alone at night.
Yes, this was another ‘we’ man, but this was a ‘we’ man who was marching individually, fuelled by his own personal motives. This is the kind of ‘we’ man who mistakes a woman being friendly for flirting, because he likely doesn’t interact with women that he isn’t planning an immediate future with. The kind of ‘we’ man who doesn’t just miss social cues, but intentionally dismisses them on account of his own intentions. It didn’t actually matter who I was, the fireman had taken me at face value, and decided that I would check a box for him. He wasn’t actively listening to anything that I told him and interacting with me, he was simply nodding along, offering up his lifestyle and hoping that I would fit myself into it.

Men like this are shocking for so many reasons, but namely, their ability to dehumanise women and perceive them as a check that belongs in a box. Men like this don’t want a woman who is self-sufficient, and smart, and hyper-independent, they want a woman who exists to them as an iteration of their desires and the fantasy future that they’ve spoon-fed to themselves. They could care less about women, but they’ve convinced themselves that they need one without ever stopping to consider, why.

A ‘we’ man is a cause for concern on its own, but when paired with the active decision to neglect the cultural phenomenon of violence against women, it’s just dangerous - and reeks of a total lack of empathy and understanding. The refusal to acknowledge systemic issues, reflects not just personal ignorance, but a broader complicity in a society that still struggles to fully address gendered violence. Men like this aren’t just uniformed – they are actively choosing to remain blind to the realities that many women face every day, and that is far more insidious than simple ignorance.

I’ve since deleted Hinge, and will now vow to do what every great writer does - deep dive into their past with the aid of retrospect, and hope for a cathartic experience.

“No, no, both for me. I drink a lot of coffee” he said with a smile and eye contact that lingered for a moment too long.

“Well in that case” I said with a smile that matched his, “next time you can just order both at the same time and ask us to hold off on one if you like”.

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind” he said with another smile. Leaving his table, I could feel his eyes burning into the back of my head as I walked back toward the counter.

Behind the coffee machine adorned with a mischievous smirk, my co-worker turned friend Dani looked in my direction and started laughing, “Toriiiiii”.

“What!?” I exclaimed, acting shocked as though this behaviour was completely out of the ordinary, “it’s not a crime to flirt with customers”. She shook her head at me like a disappointed mother despite her being eight years my junior.

“I can’t see over the coffee machine, is he wearing a wedding ring?” I asked her.

“Oh my god”.  

He was five tables away from where we were stood behind the machine, but Dani had the advantage of height and youthful eyesight on her side.

“Nope.” she said, “no wedding ring”.

I rubbed my hands together like a disgusting fly before announcing, “I’m going in for the kill. When his food comes out, I’ll take it over”.

A moment later, I heard the all too familiar ‘ding!’ from the kitchen. Apparently, they were conspiring with me. I not-so-casually waltzed back over to his table wearing another soft smile, carrying his breakfast in one hand.

“Delicious!!!” I practically yelled at him before setting down his food. Hm. That was a choice.

“Have you got everything you need?” I asked in a mildly disinterested tone, attempting to undo my act of jumping ten decibels in volume. Nobody should get that excited about avocado on toast, especially when it isn’t for them.

“I’m all set, thank you” he said before jumping into, “so do you own this place?”

“Er, no”. I gestured to the café. “I am but a lowly casual hospitality slave”.

“Oh, come on” he said, “there’s got to be more to you than that”.

“There’s always more to the story” I said before strolling back to my post. Oh my god, that was the smoothest thing that has ever fallen out of my mouth, I’m almost repulsed by myself.

As I approached the counter, I saw my work friends giving me a get your ass back here and tell us what happened look. Hospitality is incredible for the way that it gives one borderline mind-reading abilities. Like how people synch up on their periods, but it’s purely unspoken comms skills. Enough time in the industry will see any normal person years later have ESP.

“Jesus Christ Tori” one of them said after I’d given them the brief synopsis.

“I know!” I said, “I don’t even know where that came from, I’m surprised I didn’t wink at him”.

“How old do you think he is?” Dani asked.

“Old enough to be your dad, doll face” I said with an eyebrow raise.

She pretended to be sick.

“Oh, come off of it” I said, “you’re twenty-one, everyone over the age of thirty is old to you”.

“Yeah but… he’s like old, old!”

“Just how I like em’” I joked.

I wasn’t sure how to top my almost cringey parting statement, but after he’d finished his meal, I confidently approached his table again.

“So, what is it that you’re so busy chipping away at over here on your laptop?” I asked.

“Well, I manage and invest in a lot of properties, and my sister has just sent me a mood board for one of them because it desperately needs to be done up”.
I considered the housing crisis, very bad. And then I considered my love for interior design, very good. Maybe I could get a job out of this.

“So,” he began, “when you’re not making excellent coffee, what else are you doing with yourself?”

“I’m a writer too” I said.

“I’m not surprised” he said, “you’re very well spoken”. DELICIOUS!!! Played again loudly in my mind. Had we experienced the same conversation?

“Where might I find some of your writing?”

“I’ll jot it down on a piece of paper for you, hang on a moment”. I ducked back to the counter met with more curious looks from my work friends.

“Can you chuck me a pen?” I asked them.

After fervently writing the handle for my Substack on a small, ripped piece of paper and dropping it to his table, I nervously retreated back to my post once more. I’d decided that in approaching his table three times I’d used up all of my flirt, but every time I stepped onto the café floor to run food, coffee, or clear a table, I could feel his gaze watching me.
When he approached the counter to pay for his table, I had my hands full steaming milk besides the POS but engaged in small talk with the property investor alongside Dani whilst she processed his payment. More lingering eye contact. Until finally, a goodbye so flirty it could be felt by everyone within a five-foot radius.

“What the fuck” Dani said as soon as the door shut behind him. “How on earth do you do that!?”

I mimed singing into a microphone and gave her my best rendition of Ocean Alley’s All About Confidence chorus.

“I actually felt like I shouldn’t have even been standing there” Megs chimed in, “that eye contact was ridiculous”.

“Is it hot in here?” I asked, fanning my face with my hand.

That evening, sitting under the almost full moon outside, I heard the familiar sound of an Instagram notification on my phone. The property investor (after what I assume was minimal sleuthing) had found me.

“Dear Ms Watts, thank you for the best coffee I had all day. You’ve had me thinking about literary works all day, and poets. Thank you. Have you read the wind up bird chronicle and have you been allowed out of your servitude for today?”

And so began a wanky back and forth between us. What should have been small talk quickly turned into a dick-swinging vocabulary contest. We were trying to impress each other but reading back on these messages now I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel slightly embarrassed. That’s the thing about talking to men in their forties as a twenty-eight-year-old, all of my gen-z jargon gets buried underneath paragraphs of succinct sentences due to my assumption that they won’t have the ability to match my dumb strides, and I’ll be immediately turned off.

Exactly one week later, after a constant stream of messages between us, we finally had a date set. Dinner at one of my favourite Vietnamese restaurants on Gouger Street, Mrs Q.
I was frantically going through my wardrobe an hour before trying to pick something to wear that would read, Yes, I’m twenty-eight, but a mature twenty-eight. I landed on a fitted pin-striped navy Cue shirt with the bottom tucked under my bra, my favourite pair of Finders Keepers high-waisted black pants, and my ride-or-die square toed, heeled Eytys boots. I took a coat with me just in case.

When I arrived at the restaurant, I was nervous. In the grand scheme of things, a week is little to nothing, but with enough dialogue it’s long enough that two people can begin to create a picture of who the other person is, or at least who they want them to be. Could I sustain the style of conversation we’d given life to over Instagram messages? Did I want too?
As I sat down and got comfortable, the conversation didn’t feel stagnant, and there was enough vivacity there that I felt like I could take a step back from the orchestrated version of myself I’d been giving to him. You might be a mature twenty-eight, but you’re still twenty-eight. I felt myself relax.

“I got a book for you” he said completely out of the blue.

“Wait, what? A book for me? Oh, that’s so nice and unexpected of you!” I responded.

“I didn’t bring it with me, in case you didn’t bring a bag big enough to fit it, but I can drop it to you at the café” he said.

“My god, a man with bag-related-foresight whose purchased me a book. Thank you, that’s really sweet of you”.

After the back and forth of filling each other in on our weeks outside of what we’d shared with one another online and other trivial things that organically came up, he launched right into himself completely unprovoked.

“Ok” he began, “I’ll tell you about myself”.

“Oh! ok” I said, “just uh, ha-ha, jump right in then I guess”.

And jump he did. The property investor talked, and talked, and talked some more, not with me, but at me. After twenty minutes of uninterrupted dialogue, we had covered everything from almost all of his investment properties, to his family beach house, to his marriage, to his children, to his ex-wife. I felt my eyes glaze over as I continued my dance: eat, nod, sip, nod, more food on plate, nod, eat, nod, sip. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t turn me off completely. I was used to men seizing any opportunity to grab the mic and give me their life story. I must have one of those faces.

After finishing dinner and a bottle of wine, he suggested cocktails, and I of course, said yes.
Down in the dimly lit basement of Maybe Mae, we continued our conversation which had thankfully grown to be an easy continuity of dialogue where I was getting more than a word in. I was enjoying myself, and from his body language alone, I knew he was too. We quickly jumped outside of the parameters of polite dinner conversation, and into body-temperature-raising flirtatiousness. An arm grab here, a thigh stroke there, and the kind of sustained eye contact that makes you wonder how they haven’t fallen out of their sockets yet. He invited me back to his hotel room, and I of course, said yes.

When I woke in the morning, I slinked into the bathroom to grab one of the robes hanging on the back of the door and curled back up in bed. He was already awake, and after a small amount of tired chit-chat he told me that he was going to grab coffee.

“Did you want me to get you anything?” he asked.

“Ooh, yes please” I said, “I’ll have a medium almond mocha please”.

As he closed the door behind him, I star-fished hotel room style on the bed with glee. How dumb is this, I could get used to it though.

The following evening, after having gone our separate ways in the morning, I received a handful of incoherent messages from the property investor:

“Ok”

“I have had the weirdest afternoon.”

“And part of that strangeness”

“Is that, as the strange person in most interactions I have”

“I have found myself since I left your company, of wanting to know things about you, that I don’t actually care about people. Is that weird?”

I read it over again, trying to determine what it was he was trying to say before responding,

“I’m not entirely sure I’m following, a couple of keyboard mishaps and I don’t want to make assumptions. I think you’re asking if it’s weird that you want to know things about me. And, if that’s the case, then no, I don’t think it’s weird at all. Hopefully I’ve not misread this haha”.

His response was, “No” and “Lol”, followed by a small number of blurred videos which made as much sense to me as his previous messages. He was drunk. I’d assumed from squinting at the footage that he was with his family at the beach house he had previously mentioned and dismissed his school-boy-like behaviour. I’m sure if I had a functioning family unit and a house on the beach, I would also enjoy the odd occasion of one too many drinks and karaoke.

The following day, the property investor invited me to dinner again. I can’t remember what I wore, but he had managed to get us in for a last-minute booking at Shobosho, another of my favourite restaurants that I (unfortunately) rarely frequented when I was still living in Adelaide. It was nice, it was a relief. Sitting at the bar, long gone was the inebriated property investor I’d spoken with the night before. Instead, in his place was a calm, kind, and generous man who spoke fondly of his family and proudly gushed at their individual traits and achievements. It was incredibly endearing. After dinner, he dropped me back home, but not before making plans to see me the next day after I’d finished work. No drinks, no dinner, just an afternoon walk at Waterfall Gully without any background noise. I kissed him goodnight and felt a sense of calm as I entered my house. It was a sensation I wasn’t familiar associating with men.

I’m not sure if it was the open environment, or the act of walking side by side, but the following day I felt as though I had more freedom talking to the property investor than I had had on our previous dates. Minimal eye contact and walking through nature can be disarming like that, suddenly I was drip feeding him morsels of information about when my dad got sick, and how I didn’t have a relationship with my mum. It wasn’t an airing of grievances, nor was it pitiful; I was answering his questions frankly and I felt less timid about being honest. He spoke to my maturity and told me that he had a friend with multiple sclerosis. We agreed that it was a hideous disease with a severe trickle-down effect depending on the circumstances and continued our walk.

When we arrived back at my house, he quickly exited the driver’s seat and walked around to open the passenger door for me.

“Before you go inside, I got you something”

He reached into the backseat and procured a bottle of wine.

“It’s a beautiful blend of light reds from my favourite winery in McLaren Vale. They don’t make many of these, so I always order a box if they come out”.

“That’s so kind of you” I said, “light reds are my favourite, thank you, that’s really sweet of you”.

He was going away for the week, so this goodbye was slightly more theatrical than the others had been.

“I really like you” he told me in-between tight bear hugs.

“Aw, I like you too” I said, feeling slightly squeamish at the unfamiliar offering of transparent feelings. Back inside I was racking my brain, I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been so forthcoming about their feelings towards me. As unnerving as it was, I appreciated the gesture of vulnerability.

The following week, the property investor asked me what my work schedule was looking like. He wanted to take me to the family beach house I’d heard so much about and being my favourite beach that I’d spent so much time at as an adolescent, I was yearning to experience it beyond a towel on the sand.
It was a Thursday evening. He was flying back in from Brisbane at 7pm and I had work on the Saturday morning, so we decided to drive separately and meet at an agreed upon spot to avoid my getting lost.
As we entered the parking lot of The Victory Hotel respectively, he phoned me to quickly touch base, which then turned into neither of us hanging up for the remaining twenty minutes of the drive. I was excited. Not only to see the beach house in person, which I had already seen photos of, but to spend two nights away with someone who was putting in a substantial amount of effort with me that I also felt safe with.  

As he unlocked the front door and I entered the house, I was blown away. The entire house (which had been in his family for years) had been rebuilt, and it was stunning. Two stories, open plan living, floor to ceiling windows, a simple but beautiful outdoor area with steps that led you to the sand, and you could hear the waves rolling in and crashing even with all of the doors and windows closed.

“Oh my god” I said about five times.

“Feel free to give yourself a tour of the rest of the house”

I crept upstairs with the anticipation and curiosity of a child, poking my nose into each of the bedrooms, flicking light switches on and off, and repeatedly muttering ‘this is obscene’ to myself before returning downstairs to be struck again by the beauty of the open space. I was in real estate heaven.
We unpacked the groceries into one of the fridges (yes, there were two fridges) but left out the essentials so that I could create a dairy-free charcuterie board whilst he whipped up some drinks.

We settled in at the dining table in tow with food, drinks, and Skipbo, and the air was immediately light and playful. I was reminding him of the rules of the game during our practice round when our conversation pivoted directly to his previous week in Brisbane: the family mediation that he had travelled there for. The atmosphere quickly changed, and in terms of responding appropriately I felt out of my depths. The closest I had been to divorce was my parents’, and despite my years of playing faux therapist to each of them throughout that long stretch of time, I was cognisant that my experience as a child of divorce wouldn’t translate to his experience as a husband who had gotten divorced. It wasn’t so much that I was scared to say the wrong thing, I was more concerned with being forced into the position of ‘silent listener’ again. I was ok with being supportive, but I wasn’t interested in being cornered into playing a role for someone else’s grievances.

“I just don’t understand why she can’t tell the boys to call me more or even call me at all” he spat after at least ten minutes of more uninterrupted dialogue.

“From what you’ve told me” I began, “it doesn’t sound like the two of you currently have the best relationship, so she probably isn’t interested in being in your corner right now in terms of rallying for your boys to contact you more” I calmly responded.

“No”. He said firmly, “we don’t have a bad relationship, I have a good relationship with her, she has a bad relationship with me”.

I felt like I was experiencing some kind of a bizarre karmic cycle manifesting or dejavu.
Ughhhh, I thought to myself, I’m not doing this again, I’m not sitting in front of a fully grown man whilst he talks me through the demise of his marriage hoping that I’ll play devil’s advocate. I’m not interested.
We didn’t finish the game. Instead, I leant on one of the tactics in my repertoire of ‘getting men to cease discussing inappropriate things with me’ and suggested we go outside. It worked.

I walked onto the sand, and standing in the dead of night, I felt the immediate comfort of the beach I used to drive to when things were hard at home. The pull of the tide, the sound of sand crunching underneath my feet, and the ocean of stars above me made my body immediately settle. I’d never experienced Myponga Beach at night before, but it was incredible. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, or a person in sight.

He eventually caught up to me on the beach. There wasn’t any kind of an apology for his behaviour, and I didn’t expect one. I’ve never encountered a man in close proximity who is willing to put his hand up and say, I fucked up, in my marriage, in my relationship, I fucked up, as a partner, as a father’. If you hold your breath for that, you might be holding your breath forever. He pulled me in close to him and I let him. My head on his chest, my eyes in the sky. It wasn’t a moment of weakness; it was a moment of humanity. I knew how many times I had blurted things out, charged with emotions and completely lacking foresight. I always regretted it afterwards.

When we stepped back inside, it was as though the fresh air had recharged the both of us. We made another drink, turned up the music, and settled into the couches to talk the fun kind of  garbage that doesn’t involve a marriage turned sour, or divorce.

As the night progressed, so too did the air of horniness, and the two separate couches had gradually turned into one. We were in the middle of being intimate when suddenly, the property investor blurted out, “we’d make such fucking cute babies”.
I don’t know whether it was my ability to compartmentalise, or the fact that this wasn’t my first baby commentary rodeo, but I ignored it. In all honesty, what are you supposed to do, or say, in a moment like that? ‘Sorry, I’m not actually entirely sure that I want children and I barely know you and you already have two kids of your own who are teenagers and I feel like I hardly have my life together, are you sure you know what you’re saying?’ No. It’s the middle-aged-man’s dirty talk. It’s biology. It’s… whatever.

The following morning, I woke up to an empty spot beside me, and the sound of the ocean performing its ritual of breaking, pulling, and crashing. I felt at ease. I rolled out of bed to draw the curtains back and was once more in a state of being awe-struck. There it was, in all of its glory – Myponga Beach, just inches away from me wrapped back up in sheets that weren’t my own. I took a picture and sent it to my work friends, they told me to fuck off.

A few moments later, the property investor walked back into the bedroom with coffees for both of us, “good morning” he said.

“Good morning to you too, oooh, thank you for the coffee, this is amazing” I responded.

He climbed back under the sheets, and I observed as my body pivoted in the other direction. I was both trying to put as much physical distance between us as was possible on the mattress and was simultaneously trying to convince myself that his baby commentary was just outlandish foreplay. Biology, biology, biology I repeated to myself. I forced myself to roll over and almost wished that I hadn’t. It was a new experience for me, being at eye-level with him during the unforgiving, stark morning hours completely sober. I looked into his eyes and was instantly reminded of my dad. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t in a gross Freudian way, but when I saw the yellows of his eyes, I recognised the discolouration immediately; ‘your liver is screaming at you, you drink too much’.

We had plans for lunch that I was already made aware of, and once I’d finished my coffee and shaken off the yellow-eyed-fear, I rolled out of bed once more and started preparing my outfit by way of carefully laying out my garments on the bed.
A pleather long button-down jacket with a thick waist tie, a Calvin Klein mock neck t-shirt, woollen knee-length shorts, and soft European leather knee length boots, all black. I’d ran the risk of not trying everything on together before packing, but when I’d put everything on, the outfit worked even better outside of my biased head.
I banned him from the bathroom and began my soft layering of contour, blush, and mascara. I also had a fresh haircut and put soft waves throughout my bob just for the occasion. I looked into the mirror at the masterpiece I had created and felt like Keira Knightly in Love Actually, ‘I look rather…pretty’. I took a handful of selfies in the adjustable back-lit mirror.

Nestled into the passenger seat and headed towards McLaren Vale, I soaked up the warmth of the seat-heaters admiring my new second-hand boots. Strangely, I’m not much of a talker in the passenger seat, something I’ve always put down to my neurodivergence – instead, I stare out the car window in silence, as though someone has taped my mouth shut. I’m just here for the ride, literally.
“So, I’ve booked us in for the exhibition at The Cube, as well as lunch at D’Arenburg” the property investor began.
“I don’t know what the exhibition actually is, but we’ll find out when we get there”.
Find out when we get there when I have the power of Google sitting in the palm of my hands? I think not.
A few clicks later, I’d quickly discovered that it was a Salvador Dali exhibition on display.
“Ooh” I said, “I actually don’t really know that much about Salvador Dali, I’m excited”.

We walked into the entrance, where a staff member was stood behind a tall, skinny desk of sorts, asking people for their reservation names.
“Hi, welcome to The Cube, did you have a reservation today?” they asked.

“Hi, yes” the property investor said, “I have a booking under (full name)”.
“Ah, yes” they said, “I have a reservation for (full name) and (ex-wife’s name)?”.

“Ha!” the property investor coughed up, “Oh, that must be associated with an email address from the last time that I was here with (ex-wife)”. “It’s been years, it’s probably been about ten years since I was last here ha-ha, yes that is my name, but this isn’t (ex-wife)”. Ummmm.

Observing both the dialogue unfolding before me and the staff member’s facial expressions, I garnered that they couldn’t have cared less about his ‘not my wife’ spiel. They handed us our tokens for the exhibition and subtly shut the conversation down. There was that hospitality ESP again. I knew what they were thinking, and I cringed on the behalf of both of us.

I won’t lie, the exhibition was amazing, and I’d had no idea that Salvador worked with so many mediums over the course of his career. Paintings, sketches, photographs, and bronze sculptures lined the interior of the naturally lit gallery. I quickly shimmied out of my uncomfortable demeanour and slipped into grateful as I made my way through the plaques until I found my favourite, “Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it”. We continued our silent back and forth pacing, crossing paths every few moments to point out a particular piece and ask, have you seen this one?
After we’d completed the rounds, and I’d taken a handful of photos of Dali’s tarot cards, we continued making our way through the rest of The Cube until we reached the top floor where they hold wine tastings. To of course, have a wine tasting.
I’ve always found these scenarios to be very telling of a person, particularly older men. Were they willing to eat a slice of humble pie and enjoy the experience for what it was, or did they want to use the setting for conspicuous gloating rights, as though their strong palate was indicative of their wisdom and maturity? He sat somewhere in the middle and purchased a variety of wines to take home. We made our way back downstairs and exited The Cube to make our lunch reservation at its neighbouring restaurant, d’Arry’s Verandah.

As we entered, we were met with the restaurant’s maître d, who asked if we had a booking for the afternoon.

“Yes, it’s under (full name) and (ex-wife’s name) but this isn’t (ex-wife’s name) ha-ha. I must have made the booking under an old email address by accident. I haven’t been here in so long. It must be about ten years since I’ve been here”.

“Well,” the maître d looked at me painfully, “it’s nice to meet you not (ex-wife)”.

“Ha-ha, yes, it’s nice to meet you too”. I was embarrassed on his behalf. It seemed so strange to me that he felt it necessary to give context to strangers in a context where the details were very much unimportant, twice. We were shown to our table, and he continued to talk out loud to a person who wasn’t there, “Not (ex-wife) ha-ha”.
I willed myself to compartmentalise again.

We were getting through lunch just fine until he excused himself to go to the bathroom which was located outside of the restaurant just a few steps away. When he re-entered, he was talking on the phone and continued his conversation at the table for a further five minutes. The restaurant was small and moderately lavish, and I sat there trying to determine if I was holding him to unfair standards or if he had in fact, left his etiquette at the door. I remembered that he was paying for the beautifully plated three-course-meal and accompanying wines and decided that I was being unfair. (The chicken was unreal).

After lunch he wanted to venture to another winery for a tasting, the same winery that was responsible for making his favourite blend of red in finite batches that he’d gifted me a bottle of. At this point, I was knackered, but I didn’t want to deny him of his wanting to have another experience together. It was a really beautiful venue, with knowledgeable and friendly staff, but I could feel my energy levels depleting. I barely made it through the tasting and found myself repeatedly apologising for my diminished demeanour in-between large yawns. He purchased more wine, and we decided to call it a day.

Back at the beach house, we got changed into our comfies and opened one of the bottles of wine that he had purchased during our outing. He sat on the couch whilst I sat adjacent from him cross-legged on the rug shovelling hummus and crackers into my mouth, largely neglecting my wine. I’d barely made it through half of my pinot, when I suddenly realised that he was pouring himself his third glass. I was trying to abstain from judgement, but then the yellow-eyed-fear crept back up and he immediately began to discuss his ex-wife again. At this point, my Vyvanse had completely worn off and I’d almost made it through the entire box of crackers, I was completely checked out. I offered up a handful of empty ‘mmmm’s’ before excusing myself to take a shower.

After my well needed moment of respite, I re-emerged to discover that the bottle we had opened earlier was empty, and another had been opened. I suggested we watch a film on account of not having the bandwidth to endure more marriage related talk (or any talk for that matter), and he willingly agreed.

Fifteen minutes into the film (Easy-A), I decided that I was hungry again, and told him that I was going to make a bacon and egg sandwich. I leapt up, incentivised by my hunger pangs, and got to work for all of five minutes before the property investor tipsily sauntered into the kitchen.

“Hiii. you all good?” I asked.

“I just want to be close to youuuu”

And I just want to make my sandwich in peace.

I placed my hands on his shoulders and gently re-directed him back towards the couch.

“I’ve seen this film so many times, it’s so funny, ha-ha oh look, you just missed a funny moment. You should sit back down and watch it. I won’t be long”.

I felt like someone’s mother, which is in any context, never sexy or appealing.
In tow with my breakfast for dinner, I sat back down on the couch with him and began eating it as delicately as one can consume a double bacon, double egg sandwich. It was a cream couch, after all.
Half-way through my greasy goodness, I saw in my periphery vision, the property investor was leaning forward on the couch looking at me. He was watching me eat, as still as a statue. I did my best to ignore it, and kept my eyes glued to the tv in hopes that he would resume a normal posture. I finally saw him lean back, and I felt my body unstiffen. A few moments later, I observed as he repeated this behaviour, leaning forward and staring at me whilst I consumed my food. What is happening right now?

“You all good?” I asked a minute later, trying to mask the concern in my voice.

He didn’t say anything but leant back into the couch and continued watching the movie.

I was officially spooked. When the movie ended, I declared that I was exhausted and was taking myself to bed. I climbed in under the covers intentionally facing forwards to avoid him attempting to spoon me. A few minutes later, he got into the bed with me and being too drunk to read the room, defied the laws of personal space. He edged closer and closer to me until his nose was pushed up against mine, I was beyond spooked, I was now swimming in the ick and internally screaming. I suddenly felt his tongue trying to sharply push its way into my mouth. Fuck. No.

“Mm. No. I’m really tired”.

“Oh, goodnight then”.

Hours later I was woken by his snoring. Not the regular kind of snoring, the middle-aged drunk man’s borderline sleep apnea kind of snoring. I grabbed my phone and my water bottle and crept into the second downstairs bedroom to resume my sleep. Apparently, there’s no rest for the wicked because moments later I could hear his footsteps throughout the house; I knew that he was looking for me. I heard the footsteps edge closer to the second bedroom and shut my eyes like a child on Christmas Eve who’s doing a poor job of pretending to be asleep. But after confirming my new sleeping location, he thankfully went back to the other bedroom. Where I could later still hear him snoring.

In the morning, he was awake before me again. I hurriedly snuck into the bathroom, and began getting ready for work, wondering if he was able to remember his strange behaviours from the night before. Either he was acting nonchalant, or the events of the night hadn’t caught up to him yet, but when I emerged, he was back to his normal, sober self and kindly offered me a coffee. There was a part of me that felt not guilty, but regretful on his part. Had he just refrained from consuming so much wine, I was certain that we could have avoided all of his bizarre mishaps. Not my circus, I had to remind myself. I finished packing my things and began my drive back to Adelaide for a Saturday morning shift at the café.

“How was it!?” my manager asked as I walked in.

“Ummmmmm” I grimaced.

“Oh my godddd, what now Tori?”

Here’s the thing about being mildly transparent with people about your dating experiences when you have a string of dating horror stories. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how honest you are, or how awful the men are, there are always people who will assume that your standards are too high, or that you’re actually the crazy one, or that you’re lacking in some kind of girlfriend-material-DNA that comes so naturally to some women in long-term relationships.
I gave her a condensed but fair synopsis of the weekend, and she thankfully back-pedalled on her mildly judgemental response, and agreed with me that I needed to clip it.

It was tempting to just disappear from my comms with the property investor, surely, he understood that he had behaved in ways that were inappropriate, and downright strange. But I believe in karmic retribution; if I was going to date as a twenty-eight-year-old, then I needed to behave like a twenty-eight-year-old. I messaged him and thanked him for taking me to his family’s beach house and explained that I just wasn’t feeling it in the ways that I had wanted to. His response in turn, was so calm and rational, that I found myself momentarily second-guessing both of my feet being out of the door.

I replayed my mental rolodex of the weekend’s events and quickly found my sense of rationale again, not my circus.

As our server approached us once, twice, and then three times in their attempts to take our order, I suggested to him that we stop speaking and look at the menu.
“Ok, what can you eat on here?” he asked me. After listing off everything that I could eat, and would eat (a surprising amount), we quickly narrowed it down to five plates with ease. More relief. As someone with an obscene list of dietaries, the ordeal of sharing food with a stranger/date can be challenging and almost always leaves me feeling like a nuisance. But not this time.

Everything from the food (with the exception of the pork salad) to the wine to the conversation was more than palatable. Leaving no room for dessert or small talk, the gold miner asked me what I’m looking for. I was slightly thrown by the directness of his question, and quickly fumbled between “I suppose I’m not on a dating app to pass the time” and, “I’m very bored with the idea of casual sex.” His eyes lit up; I must have answered correctly because in his next breath he confidently tells me “great, I’m looking for a partner”. I was simultaneously impressed by his brazenness and feeling timid toward the speed with which the conversation was unfurling. Is this normal? Suddenly remembering my age, I decided it must be.

Clocking that the staff had ceased paying any attention to us and were no longer asking if we wanted anything else, I suggested it was time to move on from the venue. Pointing to the remnants of food on the table he asked, “should we take this away?”. “Yeah” I said, “we may as well”. After successfully filling a takeaway container to the brim, the gold miner before putting the lid on asked, “oh, wait, did you want any of this? I just eat so much every day. I have to make sure I get all of my calories in”. I intentionally sidestepped the calorie comment to avoid slipping into a likely rabbit hole on his part and told him with a smile, “it’s all yours!”.

Still feeling whimsical and entitled to gloating rights in relation to our new house and its appealing deck, I confidently suggested my (new) place when he asked where we should venture too next. The gold miner happily agreed to my suggestion, and upon arriving, two green flags were birthed. Firstly, he marvelled at the deck and the views despite it being dark (you couldn’t see a thing), and secondly, as we made our way into the kitchen, he comfortably joined my housemates at the dining table. Nice. A man who can hold his own and isn’t afraid of women. I gave myself two mental thumbs’ up.

Post table conversation, the gold miner and I made our way back to the deck where he asked me if I would be interested in spending the following day with him on his boat. Having not been on a boat in years, and deciding he probably wouldn’t kill me, I was thrilled at the prospect of ‘passenger princess by sea.’ I said yes, and immediately began mentally planning my outfit. When the finer details of the second date were ironed out, I informed him that it was time for him to go, and time for me to get some sleep. And maybe I was quite tired, because when he kissed me goodnight, I neglected to acknowledge how concerning his parting statement was: “I’m so glad I got you before anyone else.” Amazing isn’t it, the things we’re willing to overlook for a boat owner.

The following day, adorned in my chicest white linen shirt and shorts with my favourite bikini underneath and a cap I’d found, I pottered down the street to meet him at his car. We’d planned to purchase a watermelon on our way, so I’d packed my favourite Asian grocer knife just for the occasion. What can I say, I love accessories and the peace of mind that comes with harnessing a potential instrument of self-defence. On the boat we got, and off to Magnetic Island we went.

It was dreamy. I immediately decided that I loved boats and was even fonder of Magnetic Island’s water from a bird’s eye point of view. We spent the afternoon feeding enormous fish by hand, snacking on watermelon, and dipping in and out of Florence Bay’s turquoise water.
Each time we’d find ourselves back in the ocean, I was observing that the gold miner was making a habit of holding onto me for dear life despite his body keeping us buoyed. I’d gently pull away in hopes of having a swim, and he’d tug on my ankles and pull me back in again. “You’re quite touch heavy, aren’t you?” I teased, sensing myself becoming mildly frustrated by the lack of personal space he was offering me in an entire ocean. No matter, I thought, as he finally let go and I was free to swim my body’s short-lived tension away.

Back on the boat and headed towards the mainland, both of us spent from hours in the sun, I thanked him for taking me out. “I had a really nice time with you today.” I offered. “I had such a nice time with you too” he said, followed by “and hopefully if all goes well, you’ll never have to speak to another man again.” PARDON. I felt my body tense up again with something deeper than frustration. Did I hear him correctly? Very windy, my hearing is subpar, no… surely not. “I was thinking” he continued, “you could give me a hand cleaning the boat when we get back cos it’s a really big job, and then maybe we can get something to eat?” My gut was saying, NO. But my people pleasing tendencies performed a paranormal act and before I had time to mull it over, I’d suddenly squeaked out a weak, “sure.”

I asked him to drop me back at mine on account of desperately wanting to have a moment alone and needing to have a shower. “I’ll just have a quick rinse and then I’ll drive over to yours and give you a hand with the boat”.
Standing under the shower head exhausted with my stomach performing its internal toll of alarm bells, I decidedly ignored them. I’d already agreed to help him and really, what’s a couple more hours? I knocked back a protein bar and an Up’N’Go, preparing to exert more social and physical energy that I didn’t have.

By the time I’d arrived at his, a miracle had been performed; he’d cleaned the boat! Thank fuck. We were about to jump in his car en route to food when he realised he’d forgotten to secure the boat for the night. Handing me his car keys to momentarily nurse, he began trivially discussing his keychain, and how the man who invented it had one day bent a coat hanger into a different shape when he was struck with an idea, seeing him quit his day job. “Ahhh” I said, “I’m still waiting for my million-dollar idea.” “You could always do OnlyFans” he joked. Not knowing what to say, I offered up a version of a small laugh in response, and as I reached for the passenger door, he squeezed my shoulders from behind and firmly told me, “Don’t worry, we won’t have you doing that.” I felt my eyes widen. Help! Me!

Sitting idle in the passenger seat, he reached for my hand. “Are you ok?” he asked, “you’re very quiet”. Debating what would happen if I told him the truth and deciding I would be better off confirming my suspicions I coyly said, “I have a confession to make…I actually did do OnlyFans”. Immediately, the gold miner dropped my hand away, he was stunned, and I felt him physically recoil from me as much as is possible in the confined space of a car. His disdain was palpable. “Right” he said disapprovingly. And then, he began his string of pointed and invasive questions carrying a discernible air of judgement I could have choked on.

“How old were you?”

“So, you needed the money?”

“And you’ve made every effort to remove all of the content online?”

“Is that the only sex work you’ve done?”

“Do you regret it?”

“How many subscribers did you have?”

I answered all of his questions, observing myself lying more than once on account of not knowing how he would react. I felt sick. I felt stuck. A tsunami of anxiety washed over me, and my stomach was wound in the thick kind of knots I hadn’t experienced in years. “Right” he said again. “I think I can look past it”. Thank you, oh gracious one!
I felt my brain go unusually quiet and my body stiffen.
“But we won’t be telling anyone about this”. Is this man for real? As I considered what kind of injuries I would sustain if I jumped out of the moving car’s window, the gold miner leapt into his short-sighted but long-winded rhetoric layered in thirty plus years of misogyny, even daring to go as far as “I just don’t understand why women do it when they can be so much more”.
I felt my jaw drop as wide as a python before they devour their prey and curtly responded, “Hm. It’s not that simple. It’s very nuanced and complex.”
I understood then that no matter how many anecdotes and perspectives I could have given to him, his was a binary style of thinking saturated in wilful ignorance. It simply wasn’t worth my time.

When we arrived at the pub, I had no idea how to proceed given my car was still at his house and I was dissociating, I felt trapped. Making a quick dash to the toilet I hurriedly messaged Amelia with shaky hands and a condensed version of the events, my stomach in my throat. “oh nooooooo” she immediately text back, “Oh I’m so sorry”. I quickly typed back before setting my phone on silent and shoving it back into my bag, “I have to go back to the table now”. I didn’t want to leave the safety of the cubicle, but I knew I had to face him.

Sitting back at the table, wishing with every fibre of my being to be anywhere else he asked me again, “are you ok?” “you’re still very quiet”.
I exhaled. “Ummmm” I began. “So, mentally I’ve sort of shut down, and I don’t really know how to communicate when I enter this state”. I paused briefly before proceeding. “You told me you could ‘look past it’, and I uhhh actually wasn’t looking for your permission, or your approval to be ok with my past. I told you I don’t regret it, but it’s made dating incredibly difficult for me, and I’m not naturally in the business of announcing it to people I’ve just met. You’ve made me feel incredibly judged”.
Cue the back-pedalling.
“I’m sorry for making you feel judged” he begins. “I just don’t know anyone whose done it before, and I guess I didn’t know how to respond. I’m sorry for upsetting you and for hurting your feelings”.
I was still dissociating, but after unintentionally prying out the grossly misogynistic truth of him, I had no intention to ever see the gold miner again and didn’t care how uncomfortable I was making him. “Right” I said, “Also, ‘we won’t be telling anyone about this?’, that was a bizarre comment to make”. “I just-” he interjects, “I just meant like my family. Like if you were my girlfriend, I couldn’t have my brother seeing it, I couldn’t have my family finding out about this, is that fair??” He was growing defensive, and I had already surpassed defiant from the moment we had exited his car.

Sensing that his weak argument was failing to penetrate the stone walls I’d erected around me, he took one last manipulative swing that I was completely unprepared for. Taking my hands into his, his face looking forlorn and solemn, he explained to me that because I had shared something personal with him, he’d wanted to return the gesture.
“I had cancer when I was fourteen”. Is this actually happening? somebody punch me in the face right now. I want out of this fever dream. It was the most desperate, deeply uncomfortable attempt at balancing the now immoveable scales I’d ever witnessed. I was stunned at his efforts to try and compare an if not life-robbing, life-altering illness with my autonomous decision that I never once hinted was any kind of a ‘sad story’.
I plucked my hands out of his and said sincerely, “That’s awful, I’m very sorry you endured that” and, “I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to say”. Seizing at the anticipated ‘sorry you had cancer’ apology he had forced out of me, the gold miner proceeded to tell me “it’s ok, it’s ok Tori!” followed by “so, do you think you can forgive me?”.
I wanted to disappear between the bun of my untouched chicken burger and pretend none of this was happening. Not an option. Instead, deciding it would be a bit too theatrical for my liking to tell a man in a pub I’d known for 24 hours (who I would have to sit in a car with afterward) that actually no, I wasn’t interesting in ‘forgiving him’, I told him I would have to sit on it. “Yeah” he said, “I think it’s something we probably both have to sit on”. Oh my god, I’ve done it, I’ve quantum jumped into a special kind of hell where a man’s forgiveness I wasn’t seeking is suddenly contingent on my own.

As we made our way back to his house seated uncomfortably in his car together, I was past the point of itching to escape – I felt as though I was having an out of body experience. Finally arriving I immediately reached for my keys, but not before he offered one final plea: “When you sit on it, please don’t forget how much fun we had today and last night. I’ve had the best time with you, and this doesn’t change anything for me, it doesn’t change how I feel”. I nodded at him slowly with no expression and backed away. As I entered my car, I remembered an episode of Sex and the City I’d recently watched where Carrie warns her audience: Beware of the ‘we’ man.

The following morning as I was preparing to make breakfast, I opened the second drawer in the kitchen to grab my favourite knife when, the knife! I’d left it on his bloody boat. I was resigned to purchasing a new one when an hour later I received a message from an unsaved number: “Hey I have your knife I’ll leave it on your porch today x”.
“Hi, thank you, I appreciate it” I responded.
Great news about the knife I’d securely packed from Adelaide that I’m strangely attached to, bad news about my only Sunday plans: deck. Which I was then committed to avoiding to all costs to minimise the risk of having to see or speak to him again. I closed the curtains and the front door, taking to peering out of my bedroom window every couple of hours like an unhinged woman who was suddenly paranoid about white four-wheeled drives.

Seven hours later incidentally armed with strength in numbers, I was enjoying a wine on the deck with my housemates when the gold miner decided to finally show up. With the space of the long driveway and the minutes ticking by, it felt like an unnatural standoff with neither of us knowing how to proceed. I ducked inside to grab my phone, expecting to see an ‘I’m here’ message, but nothing.
“What’s he doing? I asked my housemate Jordy as I re-emerged. “Umm he’s just been sitting there playing with his air freshener, Amelia’s gone down to grab it”. My hero.
Striding back towards us in tow with my knife, Amelia gave her best rendition of the conversation he’d attempted to instigate, “sorry for not coming up, I was just on the phone” and “what are you guys up to? It looks so nice up there”. Sir, thank you for returning my knife, but you are not invited.

Nearly a week later, I’d declared myself in the safe zone - I hadn’t heard from him. Having never reached out to offer any version of ‘forgiveness’ that he was asking for, I’d assumed that we now shared a mutual disrespect for one another’s values. But I was wrong. It seemed that the gold miner had spent the previous week convincing himself he really could look past it, likely wrapped up in a Madonna-Whore complex of his own doing and deciding that contingent on my now ‘appropriate’ ways of living, I could be some kind of a sanctimonious woman of purity, just for him.  

The gold miner: “Hey Tori, how are you? Any chance you’d be up to catch up again? I had so much fun with you and I’m still interested in you. I think we were both buggered after being in the sun all day haha, let me know. Xx.”

Me: “Hey gold miner, I think it ran a bit deeper than just being tired from the sun. I’d just like to leave things as they are”.

The gold miner: “Fair enough tori. X”.

Who knew, that when all else failed, you could always blame the sun for your bigotry.

Two hours after my contradicting declaration and back home, I was carefully selecting my outfit for a spontaneous afternoon coffee date with the pilot whom I’d exchanged a handful of messages with on the app the day before.
The pilot and I got along well enough, he appeared to be smart, courteous, kind, paid for my coffee and got the door for me. After parting ways two hours later, I’d decided that despite not being my usual type, he had asked a healthy number of questions and was handsome beyond the orchestrated Hinge exterior I’d seen slithers of. Sure, I thought, I could see him again.

That same day later in the evening, the pilot messaged me: “What’s on the schedule tomorrow morning? I know two dates in two days might be a bit much, but I think we should break the norm.” Still having no friends up here and desperate for a social interaction with someone new, I enthusiastically agreed to meet for another coffee the next day.

When I arrived the next morning (ten minutes late because I got two cafes mixed up), he was donning a pair of insanely large sunglasses that I encouraged him to remove on account of wanting to see his eyes. This wasn’t entirely a lie, but the sunglasses were difficult to look past and I wasn’t sure I could make it through an entire coffee date staring at what looked like a large reflective sun visor. He willingly agreed, laying on a thick layer of bashful toward my charming (but necessary) comment, and we continued the infamous tango of second date dialogue until we’d both consumed two coffees, and I needed to be somewhere else. We hugged goodbye, and I made my way back home to Amelia who was prepping our bags for a day together on Magnetic Island.

“how was it?” she asked.

“don’t get me wrong” I said, “it was nice, but I just don’t know if he knows how to be silly, like, at all.”
Knowing how fundamental the combination of smart and silly is to each of us respectively in prospective partners, we grimaced simultaneously and made our way to the ferry.

The following day, after a reasonable amount of post-date messaging, the pilot upon remembering a passing comment I had made about my desire to have a barbeque suddenly mentioned his mutual desire for barbequed meat.

The pilot: “I think I want to have a BBQ, you’ve inspired me.”

Me: That sounds divine, you should! Have a bbq!

The pilot: “I couldn’t do that without you after it was your idea, I’ll save that excitement for when we can do it together.”

Me: “You’re absolutely free to have your own bbq to perfect your skills and techniques before we have our own.”

The pilot: “Ma’am, they’re perfected.”

Me: “Talkin’ that big talk Mr Pilot.”

The pilot: “Makes it more meaningful when I walk the walk too! I like setting expectations high and then still exceeding them.”

Me: “Wow. That’s extra big talk.”

The pilot: “Too much?”

Me: “We’ll see.”

The back and forth continued until suddenly I was preparing another outfit for another spontaneous date, only this time he had invited me to his house for what I had assumed would be a casual backyard barbeque. Wrong. Adjacent to his house at a small park, I made my way around a large bush to discover that this man had not only dragged his Weber Q across the road but had set up an entire outdoor setting for the evening. Placemats, a tablecloth, chilled water, ginger beers (at my request), a speaker, condiments, and a cooler bag filled with an assortment of me-friendly (gluten and dairy free) meats. The man even made a salad. Suddenly, I cared a little bit less about his seemingly not-so-silly self.

As the night progressed, so too did the conversation, and I recognised how nice it felt to speak with a man who could both keep up with me intellectually and manage my constant topic-hopping. Until suddenly, we’d somehow topic-hopped all the way to him convincing me it would be a great idea to take his motorbike to get gelato. I told him that it would be my first Juliette’s gelato experience, and that he could be a cult leader.

Sitting with our cups of dessert at Juliette’s, the pilot says to me, “I’m so excited to do so many of your Townsville firsts with you.” and “I found your RUSSH piece, but I didn’t read it. I’ll wait until you’re ready to tell me about it.”
Do you see where this is going? I didn’t, I was too busy thinking how very ‘Andie Anderson How-To Girl’ it was of me to get on a motorbike with a man I barely knew wearing a tank top. I was goggle-eyed and about to be damned.

After two days of suffering in our unit without air-conditioning and a consistent stream of text messages between the pilot and I, he invited me to his house for the afternoon. Layered in sunscreen and other physical armour (menstruation and months-long unattended pubic hair) that I’d hoped would prevent me from sleeping with him, I arrived feeling confident in my harmoniously anti-sex self. Until. Two hours later, I’d taken the scenic tour of his house including the couch, the bed, the shower, the bed, and the shower (again). Any previous ideas I’d held about my inconsequential sex stamina immediately disintegrated before my eyes. “What the hell was that?” I asked him. We stood in the shower for close to an hour talking absolute nonsense and I finally saw that not-so-silly pilot, could in fact be quite silly after all.

As we lay in our post-romp, post-shower sheets, the pilot picked up where he had left off, and once more took to staring at my body, showering it in what felt like previously rehearsed sentiments.

“it’s like you’re not even real, it’s like someone has carved you out.”

“are you AI?”

“let me see, one more time”

“oh my god, pilot.” I joked, “you’re obsessed with me.”

“I think I am.”

One last euphoric snog goodbye, and I was driving home listening to Sabrina Carpenter feeling mostly at peace with my decision to have been intimate with him. ‘It’s fine’, I tried to convince myself, relying heavily on the lyrics of Bed Chem to maintain my blissful state of ignorance before crashing back into inevitable reality: another man hyper-sexualising me who got exactly what he had wanted when he instigated his pursuit. But I wasn’t going to let my physical anxiety be louder than my tangible experience. So, I held onto my morsels of hope that I wouldn’t soon be pooling him in with the others and made it all the way to Lie to Girls before I made it home. Irony is never lost on me.

The next, and *spoiler alert*, last time I saw him was a week later after he had completed a round trip to Melbourne, and I had finished moving house. It was a Monday night. It was 10pm. And not to reprimand myself but, come on. I suspected it was a sinking ship and still declared myself the captain. Despite farewelling me with a “see you soon, please” in the morning, my intuition was screaming at me, and on my drive to work my brain had decided that it wasn’t going to let me forget his hands around my waist constricting me as he repeated himself out loud, “you’re so perfect.” The pedestal. I’d been forced upon it enough times by now to know what comes immediately after. The crashing, or more accurately, the slow-burn fizzling that amounts to nothing but space and, “what the hell was that?”

The pilot continued to sporadically message me in the days following my boarding the sinking ship, suddenly becoming too busy to sustain conversation, or follow through on tentative weekend plans. As it turns out, Mr Pilot can neither walk the walk, nor exceed expectations.

Cont.

Two days following my posting this recount, the pilot sent me a text:

“I may not have read RUSSH, but the latest piece was really eye opening. A really emotive read”.

Shit. I ran into Amelia’s room and showed her the message, and she sat on her bed cackling at the message and the entire situation.

“Obviously, I had to expect that there was a likelihood of this happening with my sharing these stories on Substack” I said, “but I didn’t expect it to happen this quickly, he doesn’t even follow me on Instagram”.

“Are you going to respond?” she asked.

I laughed, “god no, I mean he’s being completely facetious, right? I find it so difficult to know because I take everything at face value!”

“Tori, yes” she said, “of course he’s being facetious, he’s awful”.

No less than five minutes later, I had received another message, not from the pilot, but from a woman in Adelaide on Instagram.

“Oh god is this a man named (insert real name) because I had this exact experience”.

“Oh my god, yes???” I responded, “I am gagged right now, (insert real name and official job title) from Townsville?”

“YES HAHAHA” she responded.

It was a bonding experience that had me in stitches, I couldn’t believe the timing of the two seperate messages. I also couldn’t believe that the handful of anecdotes I’d publicly shared could be identified by another woman 2,523 kilometres away.
I recoiled at the thought of how many others there must have been and convinced myself that I wouldn’t hear from the pilot again.

Unfortunately I was wrong. It seemed that in failing to provoke me via text, the pilot was willing to attempt to broach different digital comms territory. He still wasn’t following me on Instagram, but there he was almost two weeks later sitting pretty in my notifications.
‘The pilot liked your photo’.
Having danced this dance before, I checked my messages to confirm my suspicions, and there he was again.

“Chapter 1 seemed like it was more fun” sat in my message requests.

Ugh. I had two choices. I could decidedly ignore him again, maintaining my state of calm nonchalance, or I could grab the apple with two hands and bite.
Admittedly, pettiness prevailed and I decided on the latter: I went against my better judgement, and I bit.

I responded with three yawning emoji’s, but not before taking a screenshot and sending it to my new Adelaide internet friend.
At the time, it seemed like a constructive way to put a nail in the coffin and express my feelings of, this is boring, without giving him any dialogue. I’d wanted to shut him up, and my ego had wanted to have the final say. A successful twofer in my eyes.
But one should never underestimate a man with a spoon, a pot, and a fragile ego’s ability to stir.

“It was quite funny though, I’ve had people from across the country contact me and ask if I’m the pilot haha” he responded to the three tired cartoon faces.

I continued ughhhing to myself. What is the point of this dance if not to save face?

“That’s crazy. I had the exact same experience. “Is this (insert full name)?” I picked my spoon up and stirred the pot with him. I wish I hadn’t.

“Crazy. I hope you don’t have any more traumatic experiences with gold mining men”. he responded.

“Crazy. I hope you refrain from your bag of tricks that can be recognised from states away”. I wasn’t just stirring, I was now a one-woman band armed with spoons and an irritated demeanour. Leave. Me. Alone.
It was almost nine thirty when I sent my last message, and then everything between us went silent. I was about to sink my head into the pillow, until I received a screenshot of a conversation from my new Adelaide friend, between her and the pilot. He was in damage-control mode, attempting to persuade her that I had taken ‘artistic licensing’ in my recount, as though he could discredit her own experiences with him which mirrored my own, and were the root cause of him being identified by her in my story. I was seething, not only for myself, but for her as well. I responded with outrage and went to sleep.

This morning I reluctantly checked my messages. He had responded. I kicked myself for having participated at all. I knew better, I know better.

“They weren’t tricks Tori, people lose interest or change their mind, that’s life”.

That’s life? No. That was an attempt to absolve poor behaviour with an empty blanket statement he’d tried to wipe his hands clean with.
For all of my experiences with this particular breed of man, I’ve never been able to understand the behaviour further than whittling it down to ego. It’s the taxi light theory, it’s the game of cat and mouse, it’s the chase, it’s the three P’s of toxic masculinity, it’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the myriad catch-all phrases for bad male behaviour, that women like me are too familiar with. Had the pilot genuinely lost interest, why did he feel the need to continue to instigate conversation outside of communicating exactly that. Why was he so determined to poke a sleeping bear by means of messaging me in the hopes of getting my attention, when he was still on clean up duty with another woman? Why was he on my social media? Men like this never cease to amaze me for their assumption that any woman they’ve lead on will continue to hold a desperate, longing candle for them whilst they loiter in the shadows. It’s not as simple as a change of mind, merely a change of overused, tired tactics that he never expected to be publicly called out for.

If the pilot was being honest regarding his comment that ‘people from across the country’ had enquired as to whether he was in fact, the pilot, it shouldn’t be a laughing matter. But a matter of a long overdue good, hard look in the mirror.

It started with, ‘it hurts.’ I was leaving him in pain and he was making no effort to be shy about it. I’d needed to help him, to relieve him, to use my body in all of its magic and in all of its power – it simply had to be done. In my then sixteen-year-old mind, I didn’t understand manipulation tactics, I didn’t yet know that I could say no. I tried dancing around the word, tried telling him I was tired, that I wasn’t in the mood, that I’d eaten too much, I even started lying about having my period. To no avail. It was my fault for having turned him on, it was my fault for being ‘too sexy’. I’d caused him pain simply by being in the same private room as him and was the only person who could treat it.

I grew tired. Of him, of the demands of the relationship, of being told what I should and shouldn’t wear, of being asked who boys were in photographs with me, I couldn’t even cut my hair without his permission. I thought it was love. I grew tired. Of being beckoned from windows of time with my friends at school, of aggressive text messages with strings of question marks when I hadn’t responded fast enough, of finding ways to say no without actually saying no. He mistook this pervasive omission for a version of a permanent green light, and I had woken one night to him almost inside of me. I didn’t stop him. I thought it was love. I grew tired. Of all of it. And all of my versions of ‘no’ became lost to me. Three years of my adolescence and my girlhood were lost to him. And in those three years I had both learnt, and been taught, that sex and love were synonymous. And men were entitled to both.

In the years that followed, I fumbled my way through my early twenties bouncing from one bed to another. Adult, woman, sexy. It was my social currency. My exchange for empty promises that the romantic in me was desperate to deny. I wanted what they had, these men who wouldn’t bother to remember my name or send a follow up text despite having showered me in adoration the night before. These men who only saw me in the dim lights of their bedroom and turned their backs to me the morning after, until they were ready to show me out. These men who for each of their own reasons, had to keep me hidden, a secret. These busy, busy men with their big, important schedules and their intimidating social calendars. These men with their private longings and secret forehead kisses keeping me in a state of lieu, in a state of desperate yearning. I wanted what they had with their pervasive sense of entitlement. I wanted to step into their world and make it my own. I wanted more than to be desired, I wanted to be seen.

At twenty-six, after countless attempts and failures at seeking love, of exchanging my body in hopes that it would glean respect, of shapeshifting for the benefit of men and neglecting my own wants and desires, they ceased to exist. What did I actually want? The price of love didn’t seem worth tiptoeing out of bedrooms and having my self-esteem be contingent on people who failed to respect my personhood. The price of friendship wasn’t worth being encouraged to sleep over only for these men to feel entitled to press themselves up against me in the night. I still hadn’t learnt no, hadn’t learnt that I could say it out loud and the platonic relationship might not implode. I sacrificed my integrity and my safety time and time again. I hadn’t wanted to hurt their feelings. Sex and love, I had learnt, weren’t synonymous at all. But men’s entitlement was an overarching entity, and I was beginning to recognise that it bled into everything.

I stopped having casual sex, I stopped catering to the male gaze; but the male gaze failed to recognise my efforts. Was the damage done? Had I wanted for too much in the public eye and deemed myself as permanently undateable, unserious, too sexy? A man I knew years ago sought me out on a dating app recently and told me how he’d hoped to find me. I had thought he had kept tabs on my life out of humble interest and curiosity, speaking to my bravado regarding my writing over the years despite us having not interacted. But he hadn’t wanted to date me, he had wanted to have fun, a moment of respite from his breakup. Another man shortly after this I had shared a small number of dates with, and he was the first person to hear me when I said he could stay the night, but that I didn’t want anything to happen. I’m twenty-nine years old.

I now find myself at a standstill. Fear and distrust are so deeply embedded within me, but despite this, I understand love to be woven into the fabric of us as a collective humanity, an essential facet of our existence. Whilst I know that I can continue to live as I have with what is deemed to be a deficit of romantic love, I would be lying if I said I didn’t want it at all. But I now know too much, and the source of the various pain points from men of my past that cover me from the inside out are unlocatable, insurmountable. Where would anyone begin? Time and time again, men have each failed me in their own way, with their wants, and demands, and desires, and audacity, and entitlement. Who taught them that they could want for so much? Who taught us as women, to give, give, give? Even if someone were to attempt to locate that which cannot be found, I’m not sure that I have anything left to give to anyone, these men and their wants, they have each taken enough of me already.

I’m now (as of three weeks ago) twenty-nine years old. In the years that have existed between the aforementioned then, and now, I’ve largely kept these (and other) painful experiences to myself save for those who were there, and later, those who could be trusted with a degree of hurt this large without perceiving the knowledge as something they had to hold for me. I’d felt like the ‘sad friend’ for so much of my early adult life having suffered from consistent mental health crises, that it had always felt like a risk to expose myself and the depths of my feelings to new turned close friends. I didn’t want to disregard my experiences having lent on them for so many years as a source of hope, but I was terrified that my transparency would see me relinquish my identity as the fun, uplifting, loving friend. It was only whenever I recognised the sense of my drowning again that I forgot to trust myself. And in turn, failed to remember that the people in my life love and witness me wholly, slips and all, everything that counts (and they do).   

Despite having a thorough understanding of the birthplaces of my hurt, and years of extensive on and off again therapy, I can objectively acknowledge that depression is in my DNA. And there isn’t a year of my adult life that has passed without my having fallen back into its grips. I sink, and I resurface; an act that with the aid of maturity, self-development, and graciousness, has become a substantially gentler experience than it formerly was. Understanding myself and my triggers can’t close the gap between the likelihood of slipping again and not, but I’ve worked so hard to at least make smaller. And time again, my respect for my life is always greater afterward.

Three months before I moved, I once more acknowledged that I was observing my life more than I was participating in it, or more accurately I was observing my days bleeding into weeks as a largely lifeless entity. Witnessing my inability to recall what day it was each morning as my alarm sounded, I began to recognise the lack of feeling, memory, and hope; I was severely depressed, again.
Despite my days being regimented, I’d wake each morning disoriented, never fully remembering what I’d done the previous day, nor what I had committed to for the day ahead of me. Structure and my best self-care efforts were barely making a dent, time was as lost to me as any sense of purpose I’d formerly known.

It got very dark, very slowly, and any attempts made in an effort to remind myself how many times I’d previously been in the place that feels nameless and survived, were completely redundant. My trusted tactic of reflecting on previous versions of myself who had lived to tell the tale had after nearly a decade, stopped working, the air of familiarity choking me so fiercely, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “it’s so bad again, I need help.” And I didn’t. For three months, I went further inside of myself, I lost myself, I lost my voice, and I couldn’t write. It broke my heart to know that I was so far away from myself that I could not perform that which is my sense maker, my meaning maker. If I didn’t have that, I didn’t have anything. I couldn’t even look in the mirror, I didn’t recognise the person staring back at me.

In finally admitting my impending demise three weeks ago, it meant I could at last accept the help I was desperately longing for. And in this case, the help being offered was the safety net of one of my closest and lifelong friends on the other side of the country. A home in a new environment, and a genuine chance I could give to myself to stop relying on comfort zones I’d known for my entire life. An objectively brave act that was supposed to take place at the end of the year until I received a very obvious nudge from the universe to just go. I’ll never understand why we don’t give ourselves the credit that is due when we decide to uproot our entire lives on the basis of hope and the longing to grow. It’s a big deal, and a momentous occasion, at least it has been for me.

Friday marked one week of Northern Queensland, of palm trees, of a freshly minted library card, of sweat behind my knees, of a new life with someone I love dearly who has been with me for almost every high and low since I was twelve. And whilst I have no idea what I’m doing, or where I’ll figuratively land, I once more have a greater respect for my life than I did three months ago. Each time I resurface, I have in my repertoire another time-stamped moment, upon which I get to acknowledge the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the profound ways that they continue to shape me into a person that I really love, a person that I really want to continue to honour and care for. I had and will always have this ability stashed away in my back pocket, and it isn’t tangible, but it is something I can always reach for in shaky moments when I lack reason and tenderness toward myself.

I have, for the most part, loved the life that I have known, but I would rather live in sometimes-uncomfortable anticipation of the unknown, than turn another corner knowing exactly what’s behind it. So here’s to a new season of life, of ferociously loving it every moment that it’s humanly possible, for reaching into my back pocket in the moments that I need to, and for unabashedly discussing the trials and tribulations of living with a mental illness when I have the capacity and willingness to do so. Today I’m very proud of the woman I’ve allowed myself to grow into (inclusive of my road bumps big and small), and a little less reluctant to look in the mirror.

You see, I do ‘the things’ that see me effectively (on paper) maintain my own version of homeostasis: I exercise five times a week, I’ve been mourning dairy and gluten for years, I rarely get take away food or eat out, booze is now for special occasions, I could perhaps win a battle of the Frank Green’s with my daily water intake, I don’t experience road rage, I lean into the occasional TikTok Tarot spread (because when are they not fuelled with optimism?) and I actively avoid The Daily Mail for fear of my brain rotting. I have also begun to spend a five (two if you’re my boss reading this) minute window of my morning each work day cuddling a regular’s dog, Luna.
I am putting in the labour!

But, no matter the lengths and the constants of these measures, I still experience ‘the bad place’, no fruits. Emphasis is to be given to the nature of ‘place’, as I am both suggesting and reminding myself that it is not a permanent state, fixture, or destination. I come, I go, I leave a really awful review in an attempt to smear its campaign in my brain, and swear to never return. And then (surprise!), I do.
I wipe my feet on the mat, pluck out the spare key, and I flop on every fabric surface that exists, dragging my sun-deprived body and peanut butter protein balls with me along the way, crying.

“What did I do wrong?” and, “I’ve been doing so well” and, “I don’t know what happened.”
It doesn’t take a genius to see that the common denominator amongst these statements, is I.
And that, my sweet readers, is exactly where I have previously been going very wrong.

As fundamental as taking accountability for your actions when you slip through the cracks is, it’s not actually applicable here. At least, not in this current chapter of my life. And for a lot of you, who are doing all of the work and still falling victim to your compassionless minds, my well-intended blanket statement applies: it simply isn’t your fault.
Read that again, it is not your fault. And, you are not broken. Nor are you beyond repair. I say this with my whole heart, and hope that you believe me.

Now, a very quick lesson from my social work days, I’m going to introduce you to the bio-psycho-social model.
Biological, psychological, and social: these are the foundational elements of our lives and identities that constantly interact with one another, shaping who we were, who we are, our strengths, our weaknesses, our beliefs, our values, and our futures as they unfold in real time. There are no two ways about it, it’s two for the price of three, always.
However, these individual facets can come at a cost, particularly for those who have a family history of mental health issues. Unfortunately, not only do mental illnesses steal the show and command most of the attention of the aforementioned big three, they also interact with one another to sometimes create what I call, a total shit show. Or, a sometimes lifelong battle that sees some periods of our lives simply harder than others, even despite us doing all of ‘the things.’

Understanding this as a model of health is fundamental for understanding ourselves as we move throughout our lives. It helps us to address potential shortcomings, assists us to anticipate where things might get wobbly (and why), and more importantly, it can act as a useful guide to redirect our best efforts of self-loathing, toward things like acknowledging one’s upbringing, environment, or negative feedback loops rooted in the past that need to be addressed.
The short version is essentially: it removes the I from the equation, and creates space to consider what other factors are contributing to bad habits, too-frequent spirals, hard-to-break-patterns, or a historically bad string of ‘luck’, as some like to call it. Individuals who sometimes suffer from mental illnesses like depression are not broken beyond repair, they are simply a living, breathing manifestation of their predecessors’ unresolved pain and trauma. It lives in our DNA, it courses through blood lines, it’s just biology.

Sometimes it’s enough to remember, or remind ourselves:

1. There is so much time (to mend, to heal, to grow, to learn, to love, to have the career, the family, to reach the goal, to do the thing)
2. Ageism is a social construct that sees people thrown into binaries often drenched in comparison, fear, and ego
3. Emotional pain can always be managed (it does not have to be today)
4. Biology has a lot to answer for
5. Environment does too
6. Your twenties can be your ‘I’m working it out’ years (who says they can’t? give me their email address)
7. Change (should you desire it) is attainable
8. Life actually does not have to be as serious as we have been led to believe
9. You can make mistakes and the world won’t stop spinning and your friends will not stop loving you
10. Your emotions don’t define your character, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed if you feel them with the strength of a tidal wave
11. Believe people when they tell you that there are better days to be had, and people that you haven’t yet met to be loved - there is so much truth to both of these
12. Biology can change in incremental measures (baby steps go a long way)

I’ve been putting in the labour, for what feels like a lifetime, and I still have so many bad days. I don’t welcome them, but I’ve certainly stopped resisting them. I fall back into myself when I let the pain stay, knowing it will always leave.