Sometimes there can be magic
What was going on between C and I was untenable and one day I said as much. He couldn’t keep inviting me to a friendly hang-out and then seducing me and I couldn’t keep going to these invites with any degree of naivity thinking this time he meant to just watch TV with me.
“You’re going to have to date me,” I said. “I can’t keep doing this. And I don’t think I could go back to being friends with you just like that.”
“So you mean, I either have to date you or I just stop seeing you altogether?”
He asked if he could think about it.
After avoiding further discussion for a week, I bring it up again on a walk.
To the backdrop of the Yarra river and the curve of the Music Bowl and the sound of birdsong at dusk, he lays out his no. He couldn’t date anyone without the prospect of marrying them. He believed that sexual relationships, for women, was always more of a burden than for men - that it would be like taking something from me without offering me commitment back.
“See, to me what we’ve been doing is pretty much dating." I say. "But I had no rights. I want to go to your place whenever I want to. I want to take your hand in the street. Sometimes being truly loved at the right time can change the course of a life. I think it would be nice for us to have that. Love is ever wasted.”
“For me, it would be a lot like love, but not love.”
He didn’t need to say much else after that. A lot like love, but not love. Who would want that for themselves?
I say goodbye to him when we get back to my apartment. We agree it’s for the best. I tell him we’re still friends, but it’ll be a while before I can hang out with him and he agrees to honour this.
In just two days, he goes back to his old ways. He asks me over to watch TV, except then asks me to cuddle and wake up at 2am to watch the football after. (I say no). He asks me if I’d change my mind if he told me he needed me. (No). The next day he sends me another message about how he misses me for who I am, not for the other stuff. He tries to guilt trip me. He even calls me to seduce me on the phone. (Still no).
I’m out with friends one night when he asks me if I’m on a date. It was said as a joke but I’m angry about the context; he doesn’t want to date me, but he’s asking me like he has ownership of me in some way. I intentionally leave it on read and focus on the dinner, then immediatley remorseful because it's petty. When I call him to apologise for my childhishness, he’s in a mood.
We talk both in person and on the phone later - long, tense discussions. He said he’d been intending to tease me because he knew I wouldn’t be on a date, but when I didn’t reply he thought I really was on a date or trying to manipulate him into being jealous. And if I was on a date, then he was rethinking all of our past interactions - did it mean nothing?
I explain my own annoyance at his question, and its implication. I also describe my experience of him - of his to and fro-ing, his manipulative behaviour, the emotional availablility, the having-his-cake-and-eating-it-too. Had he stuck to his word, pronounced we should be friends, and acted with pure friendship to me then we could have carried on. Now I needed space.
He says he doesn’t believe this is who he is, but I calmly tell him that this is who he has been to me.
The next day he messages me to make sure that I’m ok, and that he wanted to let me know that he was still grateful that he had met me.
This, I thought. This is so important. Someone who can be respectful and thoughtful in complicated discussions and conflict.
A day later, however, he texts me that he was doing a cleanse of his Instagram so that it was restricted to work-related things only, and that he would unfollow me. He tries to soften the blow more by saying that he doesn’t really go on it but he can’t hide the fact I’m the only person he unfollows.
It’s in that moment that I cave. It felt like the end of even the chance of a friendship, in the way social media breakups can hurt worse than actual breakups. I call him and ask if he really meant it when he wanted to be friends.
“Of course,” he says. He sounds relieved.
We agree to try and start on a clean slate that very day. As friends.
He goes about his chores that day, picking up things for a party he’s throwing for workmates. I message helpful tips and call him later to see how he’s gone. We talk for what feels like hours. I tell him about the birthday dinner that night like I would a girlfriend. Each time I try to hang up, he finds an excuse to keep me on the phone.
Do you want to catch up for a drink at a bar after? he messages me later, when I finally end the conversation. Or back at my place, where our friendship was forged?
I am reluctant to go to his place, but say we should go to a bar close by to the restaurant, where we had been before a couple fo times.
During dinner he complains that he’s too cold to come out, so could I go over to his place for a quick drink instead? To alay my trepidations, he says he will call me an Uber home after the drink.
When I get to his, the apartment is pitch black apart from the light at the landing upstairs, where his bedroom was.
“Were you asleep!?” My eyes adjust a bit more and I realise he’s in pyjamas.
“Why did you let me come here!?” I ask. I’m at his front door, and one shoe was off, so I sit down and try to put it back on again.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Fine, One drink. Then I’m going.” I remove the shoes and march toward the dark kitchen without him. When I look back, he’s just standing there. When he does move, he tugs on the sash of my jacket to pull me in for a kiss.
I turn my head. “Nope. Nope, nope, nope. We are not doing this.”
“No way. I’m leaving.” I stomp back to door and sit to put my shoes back on. They’re complicated to lace up and each second I’m still there feels like forever.
He ascends the stairs and stands at the top landing. “You’re being silly. Let’s talk.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Are you really going to stay down there?”
With a sigh he sits on the top step and looks down at me. “Would you go to Tasmania with me?” he asks.
“I’d go with my boyfriend,” I reply, evenly.
“You’re really stubborn, aren’t you?” Then, sounding resigned, “Ok. Let’s date.”
My eyebrows shoot up. I am not expecting this. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he says. “Now will you please come here?”
I stand uncertainly. When I take my jacket off, I’m suddenly aware how much my dinner dress leaves parts of me feeling naked. Near the top of the stairs, he lays his hands gently on my hips, as if I could disappear.
I look into his eyes. “Are you just saying this to get into my pants?”
“What made you change your mind?”
“You.” he whispers. “I missed you for you.”
We dissolve into each other after that. When it’s over, he pulls me up so we are sitting, and holds me so our faces are buried in each other’s necks. For a long time he is silent. When I move to pull back he says, “Stay with me, in this moment.”
When he does eventually pull away, he says “I can hear your mind spinning away. Are you imagining the worst?”
“I know you,” he says simply. “And don’t.” He gets up to find me a T-shirt to sleep in.
In the morning, I’m shy. Prevously he’d always waited for me to leave; his time was his own when the night was over. It seems like uncharted territory. He seems less uncertain though: "Do you want to get breakfast with me?”
I smile and nod. That was how I knew he’d meant it.
Time passes. Melbourne goes into lockdown, and our plans fall apart. We spend most of it watching Archer and sports, and splash ridiculous amounts of money on fancy takeout. Our trip to Tasmania changes to the Northern Territory, then melts away to disappointment.
At the beginning, C displays some distancing behaviour every time we become closer. This upsets me, but I’m also fascinated by it, as if observing a research speciman. Sometimes it’s an unkind word, or teasing me about the vulnerabilities I'd confessed. Or wanting to spend time alone after a moment of closeness or bonding. I know he wasn’t aware of it because when I finally said, in response to him joking about me being afraid to cross the road, “Stop mocking my insecurities,” he was horrified.
“I’m really glad you said that,” he said sincerely, and squeezed my hand. “I’m so sorry.”
The behaviour stopped immediately.
Over time, I notice that he slowly opens up and becomes more emotionally available. He starts to ask me about my day. He wants to see me days in a row, and even several times a day. Eventually I’m at his place all the time. He leaves me in bed when he goes to work, and occasionally when he comes home I’m still there. He gives me a toothbrush. I shower in his bathroom. When I tell him that I feel that he doesn’t always respect my time, he makes an conscious effort. He discusses how he’s aware he takes up a lot of space in relationships, as if he knows it’s on my mind. We have a discussion about his selfishness sometimes, but he doesn’t quite agree with me.
I notice, however, he’s added his ex back on Instagram. Her mother has died, it turns out, and that’s how she’d re-engaged him. They talked on the phone. He had lived with her mother too, for a while, when they were together; and he’d lost a parent young, so the loss of a parent figure was significant to him.
Instead of admitting what really bothered me, I say I don’t want to be a hypotenuse in his life - a meaningless thing in between two words. I wanted to be a formed word, even if short.
One day, he mentions that he had spent the day writing her mother’s obituary. She’d asked him because she wasn’t good at that stuff and that he was.
Unfinished business, I thought, but found I wasn’t angry.
“Are you going to see X when you go back to LA?” I ask when we’re curled up in bed one morning.
“No, X lives in Virginia.”
I ask him if he was going to get back together with her when he moves back.
I am less sure, but don’t try to change his mind.
“M.” C’s reading his script in bed while I’m half asleep when he says my name. I look up groggily.
“You don’t need to answer, he says quickly.
“No answer needed” he says, more forcefully. “Your answer says enough.”
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
I try a few times to put words to my feelings but he hushes me, not unkindly, and I eventually fall asleep.
The next morning, I see that he’s written in the margin of his script “Do you love me?”. It’s an instruction to himself about how he should act out a scene, or speak a line.
I point it out. “Did you ask me this because you had that directon to yourself?”
“Yes, but I also wanted to see how you’d respond. It was an unfair question. I shouldn’t have asked.”
I roll over. “I never ask you because I already know how you’d respond.” I didn’t think C loved me. He’d said “I love you” a handful of times but I’d not believed a single one of them. Sometimes it was when trying to get me to do something, and once he said it in a moment of passion. Even though he was more emotionally available, he didn’t treat me like someone in love. We had more in common with friends with benefits, in some ways. There were no romantic gestures, touches like he couldn’t keep his hands off me; he didn’t try and capatialise on the limited time that I knew we had - he prioritised other things.
“I do love you,” he says. “But it’s been like driving with the brake and the accelerator on at the sime time. I’m sorry your experience of me has been like this.”
“Have you mentioned me to your friends?” I ask, curious.
“Actually, don’t answer. I already think I know this one too.”
“The answer is yes,” he says.
I was surprised to be wrong twice.
It’s September in the blink of an eye and C’s project wraps up and is leaving.
He was emotional on his last day of work. Someone had given a speech about him that was touching, and he was overwhelmed at all he had achieved, and all he had overcome in the preceeding years to get where he was. He’d moved across the world to work on it, and had spent all his days trying to get things right for his part. It was over, and he was letting go of the role had to inhabit to be apart of it.
I watched him drink two glasses of red wine in succession, then start on a whiskey. Or was it a dirty martini? Either way, he was clearly trying to drink his feelings away. His whole body softened and he slumped into me.
I cradled his head in my arms. He was getting drowsy and when he spoke, he was slurring. “I would have picked you in the real world. You’re so kind.”
I said nothing, just stroked his cheek. We were in the real world. He hadn’t picked me.
I thought back about how a few nights prior, walking to the bottle shop through empty streets hand in hand, he’d said that it all felt like a dream - being in Melbourne, being away. Like none of it seemed real.
But it’s real to me, I wanted to say. I realised how different it was for C, then. That our interactions were a part of my ordinary life, and a dreamscape for him.
Much later, and much drunker, he said, “We have saved each other.”
I was alarmed - what had he thought he was saving me from? What had I saved him from?
That weekend, we take a bath together and speak about where we think we’d be in 5 years’ time. I tell him he’ll probably marry the next woman who is good to him. He tells me that I shouldn’t write myself off as a cat lady. We do the New York Times 36-questions-to-fall-in-love in pieces because he finds it tedious but agrees to humour me. We have a picnic because the restrictions for this have lifted finally, even though it’s freezing and we’re in so many layers. He brings a jumper and a scarf for me because he thinks my coat isn’t warm enough. We end up arguing about something silly in a debate and when we apologise to each other I realise that I love him.
The last night we have together, we watch TV like always. He’s sleepy but we’re both trying not to go to bed. We complete the New York Times exercise by staring into each other’s eyes for 4 minutes exactly.
At first I felt self conscious. Then I wept - salty, warm tears that I at first tried to smile through, then couldn’t. He kept pushing my glasses up and brushing my hair away to see my eyes. Don’t leave, I’ll miss you. I’m scared I’ll be alone forever, and that I’ll never meet someone who handles conflicts the same way you do. Who is as respectful of me as you. Who I could see myself settling down and starting a family with, like I could see with you.
His eyes mirrored my sadness, but he didn’t cry. I could see he was trying to. Instead, his face settled in a look of deep grief. Long after he left, this still bothered me.
When my stopwatch beeped that time was up, he pushed me down and laid on top of me on the couch. We held each other for a long time.
When we sat up and he whispered “I’m sorry that I can’t stay”.
I ask him if there’s a universe where we might have gotten married and had kids. He tells me about the infinite monkey theorem, which he calls “monkey Shakespeare universe”. An infinite number of parallel possibilities whereby anything is possible. When I later look this up, I find out that it’s been debunked. Some things are so minutely possible, that they really are impossible. But I don’t know this until after he'd gone.
When he’s fallen asleep to the TV show for the second time, I pull him up to bed. We hold each other most of the night. I remember sleepily waking up in his arms in the middle of the night to hear him whisper - “I love you”.
So strange, he has said those words a couple of times in the time I have known him, in different contexts - this was the first time I’d believed that he might mean it. And the first time I wanted to say it back.
The next morning I help him do a final clean and sweep of the place. While we wait for his ride to the airport, we sit on the couch that we have rearranged and hold hands. He’s calm, but I’m teary.
“If you’re back next year, and if we’re both single, and if I’m still unhappy with my life here,” I say, “Maybe we can try this again, and I can look for a way to go to New York.”
He’s both startled and troubled. “Be happy with your life here,”
When his driver calls to say she’s outside, he turns to me. “Back when you were convicing me to do this thing, you said that you believed that love is never wasted. Did you mean that?”
He seems to pick his words carefully: “I don’t want you to put your life on hold. I want you to move on with your life. I have had my life on hold for so long, and I don’t want to do that any more. I don’t know where I’ll be in a month, let alone next year. I don’t want you to wait to see if I’m back next year or of this idea that if I was back then you could move to New York. It’s untenable. But I want you to know, you’ll have a friend in me for life.”
I feel like I want to cry again, and he gets up, resolute. “Time to go.”
Once outside, before we meet the driver, he asks to spend a moment alone in the apartment one last time. Through the crack, I can see he is saying a grattitude, or a blessing. After it’s locked up, he pulls me to him in the corridor and kisses me. “See you later.”
“When?” I ask “When will you see me?”
“In the monkey Shakespeare universe,”
When we’re outside, he grabs my hand while his driver’s back is turned and squeezes it before letting go for the final time.
Just like that, he’s gone.
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