by the lake

It is almost three weeks since I saw my good woman. Now I sit with her on a bench in the midday sun close to the reeds surrounding Ringwood Lake.

A week ago I write her a letter, attach it to an email. She replies, agrees with much I have written. She has already decided to see a counsellor, asks will I come too. I suggest we might be smart enough to figure things out for ourselves. So we sit together but neither of us knows where to begin. I’ve a feeling about where we will end.

She reminds me about the very beginning: 15 November 2007. I ask her out and she says no. She is a single parent, a mother, a daughter with an unwell mother in Serbia, a psychologist with a full-time job. She has no time or space for another role—‘girlfriend’, good woman, whatever—and wherever that might lead.

She changed her mind, said yes. She says she asked anything of me. She’s right. I created my own expectations. I estimated that in five years she might be ‘free’ to live with me. Way off the mark. I have wanted too much, imposed pressures on myself I could not meet. We both feel relieved not to be conjuring up times to meet over the past three weeks as we have in the past year.

We have arrived, albeit unexpectedly, at the inevitable conclusion. There is neither back nor forward from here.

The conversation halts. We look at each other, know it is time to go. For the last time. There will be no ‘friendship’. But we don’t go, and the conversation begins again.

She chastises me for not speaking my mind, being too nice to say anything that might hurt. So I speak my piece, though still nothing hurtful. She takes some points as criticism, defends her every action over five years so eloquently, she whose English is her second tongue. She sounds angry, says it’s just a way to avoid tears. My eyes brim.

She says that we have not yet begun a relationship at all, in earnest, just exhausted the narcissistic physical urges that begin these things. I thought and felt more than that. So often, she says, one person becomes ambivalent. When it falls over it is easy to blame them, to justify yourself.

But we are both ambivalent, not able to surrender ourselves to the possibility of repeating past failures. Before we had partners we could blame. This time we don’t, so we must look into ourselves. She will see a counsellor. Perhaps I will too.

I leave feeling clearer about many things, no clearer about a whole lots of others.