For three and half years I have
no doubt about my relationship and feelings for my good woman. She is the love
of my life. Searching for a photo this past week, I stumble into our holidays
together—Hobart, Darwin, Warrnambool, Noosa, the Prom—and the sheer delight of
each other. The sense of loss is a chasm.
I cannot pinpoint the seeding
of my doubt. We never fight or argue: I understand her logic though it is
sometimes not my logic. Twice I fuck up big time, admit the error of my ways,
avoid the terror of being without her. But the second time, a year ago, the
seed of doubt is sewn.
The tendrils take many forms. I
wonder if the cultural gap might get us in the end, the subtleties of language
a second-language speaker can never divine, nor ever express in their first
language to one who has but five words of that language.
We underestimate the impact of
my return to Melbourne from Bendigo.
The frustration I feel sleeping
on her lounge room floor instead of in her bed when I come down to town from
the country—at least she joins me late at night and at dawn before her kids
arise—gives way to the frustration of not sleeping in her house at all now I
live a few suburbs away. The removal of the mortar of good sex loosens the
bricks of us.
Weekend visits full of talk and
walks become scrappy midweek evenings or hours filched from the duties of our
weekends—birthday parties and saints’ days, kids’ sport, the gym, housework. I
resent that it is always me driving to her place. I resent that I don’t ride my
bike so often. The doubts fester.
Slowly they spread, the doubts,
like capillaries under the skin, unseen, a silent network transporting the
toxin of uncertainty. The rupture, when it comes, is a surprise, but not so
surprising when the searchlights of realisation and hindsight meet in blinding
glare.
Doubt undoes me, as it has
before, always the sceptic.
No comments:
Post a Comment