A Moratorium on Do-Overs

I've always had a bad habit of mining my past for fresh takes on old pain. At 35, when I wanted to reclaim the girl I used to be, I ran away from home. I wanted to feel carefree, wild, less rooted in logic, willing and able to be spontaneous - to live in the moment. But the reality is I was never truly those things, impulsive is not free if you are still terrified of the consequences and I have never not been afraid. My search to find her took me to northern NSW, into the archives of my computer hard drives, the depths of my iTunes library. So many people I had been, so many people I had lost, so many patterns I would finally have the perspective to see I had repeated again and again.

There he was, in an unassuming photo, in the bar he owned. Him listening to someone just out of frame, me with my chin in my hands eyes glued to him. Its not a photo of us, but its also not not a photo of us.  It's confronting and shameless and I felt briefly mortified at who might have seen it given I didn't take it and I don't know how I got it. But then I remembered that it had been 12 years and anyone who laid claim to him then was hardly likely to be concerned now, and I was sure he'd married even though I wasn't sure how I knew that.

Don't we all have someone in our past we never truly got over? Someone who looms large in our memories, the voice in our heads telling our stories, lending them some credence. Someone we want to prove ourselves to, who we judge ourselves against. Mine was not so much the one that got away as the one that let me get away. Which is how I found myself pacing the villa of a resort in Byron Bay, finger hovering over the 'follow' button now that a quick google search had confirmed that while he had been married, it was no longer a going concern.

You see, I have two core weaknesses when it comes to men - a relentless need to prove myself worthy to the ones who never deserved me in the first place and a burning desire to save the ones who won't save themselves. I know this about myself, even though I can't pinpoint the moment I figured it out. Somewhere in my mid-twenties I used this knowledge to build my boundaries so strong you couldn't get through with a wrecking ball. It has kept me safe, somewhat sane, and very alone.

When I finally tapped the button and my request disappeared into the ether, I felt certain I would throw up, which I suppose should have been my first warning. The aftermath was an hours long panic attack that found me lying, wide awake, at 2:45am when the first message came in.

I knew two things immediately, without a shadow of a doubt - that this was a terrible idea and that I would see it through to its inevitable conclusion. I'd bought a ticket for the express train heading in the wrong direction, and even if it happened to stop, I would not get off until the end of the line.

'Send me your number. Let me hear your voice.'

I needed to sleep, I told him. I'd call tomorrow. But there is one small loophole, a way through these concrete boundaries where if I loved you once, if you hurt me, and most of all if it felt unfinished - you still know where I keep the spare key.

'Just for a minute, please, you have no idea how much I need this.'

I sent my number, and he rang.

'Nine years.' He said.

'Twelve!' I replied.

'Nine. You were living in that apartment in Hawthorn with the balcony over the carpark.'

My stomach churned. I could see flashes of him all in black perched there, lit up by the living room light through the glass. How could I have forgotten? This was not the first time I reached into the darkness in the middle of the night. Both of us chain smoking. Him in my bed, gently saying no. The messages I didn't answer. The deep shame.

'I don't drink anymore.' I explained. What have I done? I thought.

He didn't care. Within minutes he was dispassionately describing the brutality of the time that stretched between us. The addiction, rehab, and mental illness. How he unraveled his life. The manipulation that stole to feed his demons until he had no choice but to leave our once shared city behind. He took pains to describe that this was who he had been, not who he was now. I cried silently as the way he described his marks breathed colour into my black and white memories of us. I finally recognised the skill he'd had at just 23, the way he had separated me from the group. Made me feel special even as he isolated me. Gave me just enough to want more, made me feel needed, that he couldn't get through it without me.

'Where are you right now?' He asked.

'It's only a two hour drive. I'll drive down after work on Saturday and take you to dinner.'

I didn't say no and so the clock is set to three days and begins its slow inch towards the consequences of my actions.

I continued my holiday. I read, I lay by the pool, I ordered room service. He rang every few hours and late into the night. I started writing a novel and named the antagonist after him. Every time he called it got a little easier to answer, to pretend that I actually wanted him to come, even as I constantly cried. I was grieving him before he had even arrived.

And then there he was - my unfinished business. Standing in silhouette at the hotel bar, having driven two hours to see me in this in between place neither of us knew, carrying an overnight bag. And here I was, avoiding the things I really needed to make peace with now by having dinner with a man who used to be a boy who only ever wanted me when he couldn't have me. 

A boy who shone so bright I was blinded to anything but the small scraps of affection he would give me, glossing over the time he showed up at my apartment and demanded my laptop to erase our conversation history - because he brought my favourite ice cream. Or the times he begged me to meet him in the back room so he could touch me and feel better, regardless of how ashamed it made me feel, because I told myself that he needed me. And I have always needed to feel needed.

He was and he wasn't that boy now, older and somehow both softer and harder at the edges, clearly a man holding tight to the someone he used to be. He had promised he wouldn't kiss me, but here he was striding forward, one hand sliding around my waist to pin me to him and the other into my hair, tilting my face back before pressing his mouth firmly and familiarly against mine. I was disappointed and unsurprised. It wasn't that I really cared about a kiss, but only that I had hoped he'd keep his word. To show me with his actions that he had really changed, he'd learned to listen, to wait for an invitation or let someone else lead.

But I was two people at once - 23 hoping he'd finally picked me, and 35 and tired and it had been a long time since someone had kissed me like they couldn't not. It was a familiar spell he'd always been able to cast, him brushing my boundaries aside and me feeling so grateful that he wanted me enough that he couldn't help himself. I could see it in the preceding days of phone calls, the ways he had softened my no's, nudged them aside, the way he framed it as a challenge to be brave or care less or get out of my comfort zone. How it meant he always got his way. I could see the ways I wanted it, but also the ways it could escalate - the terror of realising my hard won boundaries, my safe place, my sanity, my solitude, could still be so easily stripped away.

We put his bag in my room and then walked to get dinner, me getting us hopelessly lost in the rabbits warren of the resorts winding roads. The small gastro pub was quiet, the gnocchi I had wanted unavailable and he made a big show of going to see what could be done. A kind of behavior that grinds my gears in a weirdly specific way that meant I couldn't even look in the general direction of where the conversation was taking place.

He strolled casually back to the table and declared, 'They can make it. You're my wife and it's your birthday and they'll make it special for you.'

I smiled tightly and all I could think was how I had dodged a bullet, maybe even multiple rounds, because this was the closest I would ever have to come to being married to this man. The food arrived, accompanied by a glass of red wine for him and a non-alcoholic beer for me. He leaned back in his chair, and asked the question I suddenly realised I had been waiting for.

It turned out what I really needed was someone who knew me then, all mess and sadness, to see me now. To ask me how I got there and to point out how truly extraordinary it was. To see both of us - the me now who is terrified I've pulled some great con, and the me I was then that I carry inside me who feels like we couldn't possibly deserve it, that it's moments from all going away. And then I needed someone to look at me as we walked home in the quiet dark, and say 'but what about writing?' So I could explain how I'd lost it for years, but I'd found it again that week.

The next morning as he got ready to leave, I sat topless in the middle of the bed, my legs tangled in the sheets. We hadn't slept together, I think I knew that I would already carry enough regrets from this night.

It was better in some ways, I had no doubt he wanted me for one. But we weren't who we used to be. Time and life had not been kind to him, and I couldn't help but feel that rather than balancing the scales I had flipped the power dynamic. I had wanted a do-over, wanted the boy who hurt me then to see me now and revel in who I had become, to see and know that I was worthy, that I had become someone. I wanted that boy to want me. Instead I slipped back into the difficult life of an unhappy man, older and jaded, unable to see that the best I could hope for was the opportunity to be the one who walked away. He couldn't love me then, when we were young and stupid, but this was worse, because I was older and I knew better. And I saw now that you can't really ever go back.

'I have to get going, I need to pick up my son,' He stuffed last nights clothes in his bag, and turned his gaze to me.

'Twelve years and yours are still the most breathtaking breasts I have ever seen.'

Maybe I needed to hear that too and when he kissed me goodbye and turned to leave, I grabbed him by the shirt and kissed him again.

Two days later I have 17 missed calls from him, I text to explain I have a migraine and he replies asking me to loan him the money to pay for his divorce. I cut the cord. I knew, maybe from the moment I resigned myself to dinner, that this would be the final time I let him in. I call a moratorium on do-overs that are more like a thumb in an old bruise, if I'm going to get hurt, I'm finally ready to be hurt in some way new.