Tara Robinson
You met him while you were in a relationship with another man.
It was August, when love is either budding or being buried. You found him on a dating app where you played God — you could deem a man as wholly unloveable based on one photo of him with a silver fish in his hands. You were in a polyamorous relationship that was slowly turning septic. Your boyfriend had already touched another woman’s skin, was strides ahead of you, and you had to get on an even keel… But that’s a story for another time. It isn’t important, anyway.
What is important is that you were freshly twenty, a probationary age where a woman can be reckless at the expense of others, as long as she learnt from it. It was a time in your life where you felt entirely possessed of self. Your hair was floss pink and your stomach was flat and you could have whoever you wanted. You lived in the family home, studied half-heartedly, worked casually. Your drinks and pills were paid for and your hangovers were virtually non-existent. You were exploring adulthood with a safety net. You had no real responsibilities; no rent to pay, no savings to deposit, no one to tend to.
His first message read:
—Step on me.
His profile was unexceptional, but there were details that pulled your finger to the right of the phone screen like a planchette: the floppy, bleached mullet, the brown leather seat of a vintage car, an angular jawline, the shadow of chest hair under a 70’s striped button-up. His bio was simple, coy, as though he knew he didn’t have to put in the effort. He’d joke about it, later,
— I lured you in with my silver tongue and boyish good looks.
You both drank raspberry beers at a red-bricked brewery in one of the gentrified suburbs outside of the city. He was as handsome as the photos on his profile, a rarity, but this somehow didn’t surprise you. At twenty you expect what you are owed, the reservoir of disappointments not quite full enough to warrant gratitude when things align with how you envisioned them.
He was a musician who lived out of home. A Gemini, extroverted, instinctively pleasure-seeking. His parents lived in an ultramodern house by the ocean, where most in-landers went for their yearly holiday. He was twenty-one and jobless, his rent quietly taken care of. It’s one thing to turn a blind eye to red flags, but to be able to mould them into something redeemable is a magic harnessed by yearning women. In a single train of thought, we can turn unmotivated into go-with-the-flow, lazy into free-spirited.
He placed his glass on and off the table to make a wet chain of ring marks while he spoke. He rolled himself a cigarette, fingers gliding carefully with the paper, the filter nestled gently between his lips. In your twenties there is nothing more attractive than a man rolling his own cigarettes. It is one of the few things they treat with tenderness. He had you, then.
You went back to his house instead of your boyfriend’s. Take it as foreshadowing, a bad omen, if you will. If you were another woman, you’d talk about the butterfly effect, about seeing two roads branching out before you, a simple decision that could uproot an entire life. You were not that type of woman. The truth is, there was no choice in your mind. The expansiveness of your want snuffed out any moral decision-making within you. You could count all of the nights where you chose to be selfish on one perfumed hand. This was one of them.
Your inebriation presented itself to you in the backseat as the Uber rounded the corner of his street, your vision mirage-like, untrustworthy. You thought, just for a second, that this is how some girls die, lured to the wolfish lairs of men after being coaxed by an acceptable amount of fruity drinks. You didn’t care. For once, you were not afraid of the worst.
There is something to be said about the mutually felt energy when two people know that they are going to fuck. It’s an unspoken phenomenon, hangs in the air, low and heavy. Any other activity beforehand is just padding. He gave you a tour of his sharehouse, and you pretended to examine the neglected water fountain in the backyard, rusted cans bobbing in its contamination-black water, and wondered who would kiss who first.
It would be him. He poured two glasses of red wine from a silver bladder while you stood in his kitchen, shifting your weight from one foot to another on the perpetually sticky laminate flooring. You were both cross-legged on his bedroom carpet when he leant in, mid-laugh, and kissed you. The cigarettes made his saliva taste like something aquatic, seaweed and ocean water. He moved purposefully but with an attentiveness unmatched by the other men you’d been with. The sex was comfortable, fluid, and, most notably, didn’t feel like something being done to you. You left without the self-hating comedown that usually followed one night stands.
A woman’s desire for a man can be measured by what time she agrees to meet him. The closer to noon, the more desperate. It was sober daylight, during one of the clearest winter days you’d ever seen. You live in a country where the summers are ugly — its suffocating humidity rendering white shirts translucent, its home-destroying rains. The winters here are beautifully cloudless, the skies a thick, permeable blue, the sleepy stillness of an early morning stretched out over an entire day.
The two of you sat in his sunroom, the weatherboard humming with music. You both ate strawberries, sucking the stems and discarding them with the cigarette butts in the ashtray. He led you to the bedroom, the two finger-smudged wine glasses still on his nightstand, the remnants dried down to the colour of plums.
Sex with him felt like the beginnings of a second puberty. You, with your pastel hair, your unapologetic body, strawberry-stained fingertips pushing a pillow against his face. A spectacle of rolling hips, thighs slick with sweat under the limp breeze of the pedestal fan. Unadulterated mania. Imaginings of rainbow cathedral glass and seas of lit candles and dangling rosaries and crowns of thorns and how this moment triumphed all of the religions in the world. He told you you looked like a goddess and you believed him. You kissed for hours until the yolk of sun dipped below the row of Queenslanders and soaked the room in blue light. You drove home with delightfully sore lips and got all green lights.
The relationship you had with your boyfriend resolved itself the way a bullet to the brain resolves a tumor there. It was all utterly predictable. Your new lover’s promise of devotion and togetherness felt like a life raft next to polyamory’s sinking ship. You left and stifled any wounds of guilt with gauzy, haphazard justifications. It didn’t matter, anyway. You had something shiny and new to attach yourself to, the rest was collateral.
In the flourish came a ripe selection of problems. You would learn that there is nothing more influential in a new relationship than a man’s ex-girlfriend. She had been the one to call it off between them, and you couldn’t ignore the power imbalance this created, the nibbling distrust when he said he was over it. And, of course, who were you to question it? You were in a relationship when you had met him. There was hypocrisy dotting the edges of every fear you held.
You sought out her Instagram, in the mean, single-digit time of night where whatever you chose to do felt torturously symbolic. She was beautiful, as all ex-girlfriends are. It should’ve been enough that she was your physical opposite. Leopard print and bikini tan-lines and hair the colour of autumn. A woman who was not afraid to smile with teeth. But at the centre of it all was a full, honest life; a grid of flower bouquets, fur coats worn unironically, turquoise rock pools, latte art in handmade clay mugs, moody cocktail bars, dinner tables without empty seats. She had parents who lived in a riverfront house with an elevator and seemed to truly care if she was happy. There needs to be a stronger word than jealousy. The largeness of her life made your dreams feel small.
You wanted to be more. You needed to be more. You took his interests, the music he listened to, his hobbies, likes and dislikes, wants and desires. You took all of them and you swallowed them whole, hoping they would take to you. You went to gigs in graffitied shitholes with rude bar staff and drank warm beers until they tasted like love. You timed your texts to perfection. You never ate until the point where you were bloated. You blew him semi-regularly. You went to house parties and stood awkwardly next to him, unintroduced, shame bubbling white-hot in the crucible of your belly, trying to make sure his friends really, truly liked you, even if you couldn’t stand them. You slept in mascara to look effortlessly desirable upon waking. You tried to be spontaneous, a yes-man, the cool girlfriend. You ignored how the lack of control made your teeth hurt, made your head feel swimmy.
You had disposed of your old life, your old self. You were reborn. You, as Venus, your new relationship, your clamshell. You were young and raw and muse-worthy. For that bubble-wrapped honeymoon period, you convinced yourself that you had left it all behind — your anger, your nervousness, your shortcomings — all shedded scales abandoned in the dirt. It was only in the quiet static where you heard that unwelcomed whisper, warning you,
— look at you, sweet, sweet girl, you have done so well, but this relationship will not save you.
And it wouldn’t. In fact, it would do the opposite. There would be three years in total, from dusk-drenched beginnings, to the gradual suturing of two lives, or more so, yours to his. There would come the cohabitation and tipped scale of domestic duties that would almost break you. The perky-perfect veneer you had upheld so vehemently would become eclipsed by something monstrous. You would become the nagging woman; terminally sexless, bitching and moaning while free bleeding in her boyfriend’s boxers. One year spent wiping beard trimmings off of white porcelain and picking his yellowed socks off the carpet. Stifled resentment and endless tending. He will have neglected you into an ugly thing, and, worse, you will have blamed yourself for it.
On a balmy November evening, after kissing you goodnight with a mouth full of fumes, he will sit outside and tell his friend that he is no longer in love with you. When he is asked why he hasn’t left, he will grab the balcony railing with both hands and spit into the dark like it is the edge of the world. He will slur,
— I’m scared that she’ll regress.
Only then will you realise your mistake. In ever believing that he would be your redemption. The word regret does not suffice. You will feel it in your marrow. You will know it very, very well.
By the end of it, he will have betrayed you, in an inconceivably cruel way in which most of his kind seems hardwired to do, but even then, it won’t come close to the way you have betrayed yourself. By wanting. By loving. By changing. By letting him. By staying. By running yourself into the ground. By abandoning yourself entirely.
For it amounting to nothing.