numb

Six nights ago in Adelaide I write this.

A balled paper napkin bounces off my scone. Tracy feigns innocence. She offers a penny for my thoughts. Fact is, my thoughts and I have, like Elvis, left the building. I have no coherent thought; I’m at a loss. I am numb, sadly, dumbly numb.

All around is noise, clinking wine glasses, teeth chomping salt and pepper squid, risotto, gnocchi, penne. Voices scream to be heard over the hubbub, my own soon sore, my ears deaf with the strain to hear people leaning across the table.

This is us, the MM and KM teams in Adelaide for our quarterly gabfests, three days of endless meeting, sifting the minutiae of what we do. We fly in from all across the continent, gather in a 13-storey Glenelg hotel, talk our way to exhaustion, then jet home on Friday afternoon.

Tonight is our first night, the night we eat together; tomorrow night we will go our own ways. In the lift to the lobby I feel reluctant to go out. I chat with my Darwin colleague as we stroll up Jetty Road. Inside this Italian restaurant I sit at a vacant table, wait for the seats around me to fill.

Two and a half days after my good woman and I talk about the strange disjunct in our relationship on Sunday night into Monday I feel a wave of sadness. I put it away in the restaurant, do pre-dinner chat, relive the day’s funny moments, then the sad mist descends and I’m gone, staring blankly. And Tracy’s balled napkin hits me.

Not long after I quit the place, the first to go, no dessert. The walk back seems shorter, the footpath brighter. In my room overlooking the ocean I close the ochre curtains, prepare to write. For days I’ve struggled to write, as if I know what is coming, then when it comes, I don’t know just what it is.

Six nights later, tonight, in Melbourne, I write this.

I despair of ever making sense of people who love each other figuring out what to do with that love.

From the very start my good woman says I am her soul mate. Me too. She also talks of how we idealise the other in those first weeks, maybe years, of being together. We both know it, know we are doing it, can’t stop ourselves. This time I think it will endure.

She tells me that if it ‘gets wrong’, even if that’s tomorrow, she will go on, no regrets, no tears. Me too. She knows everything I’m thinking, feeling. We understand each other implicitly.

She likes our autistic little world together, doesn’t want to complicate it with friends, hers, mine or mutual. But in the end it isn’t enough and our worlds don’t coalesce.