Something of significance happened a couple of weeks ago which, for some reason, I've held off on discussing until now.
Some background is required. Back in 2001 I met and fell in love with a woman, Tania. For a couple of months we were close and intimate and making plans for the future. Looking back I think that is the happiest I've been, but naturally it couldn't last. Tania was a lawyer working in the corporate world and going places. One day she told me she had been offered a posting to Singapore to become the Asia Pacific regional counsel - the very job she had been striving for.
Now the job was hers she didn't want it. Why now, she asked, just when I've fallen in love? I was quiet, shocked in my own way but unwilling at first to say anything. Tania was torn up, distressed, damned if she did and damned if she didn't. When finally I spoke I told her she must go, that I did not want the shadow of her regret getting between us. After further discussions she agreed, and we resolved to part as a couple but too remain friends. It seemed easier that way.
To cut a long story short she left amid all sorts of other things, and about 2 months later I followed her. My actions were romantic, even whimsical, and a belated attempt to prove the commitment I had been unwilling too earlier. Quite typically I went beyond the call, resigning my cushy job, selling my car, letting out my apartment, and effectively burning my bridges. It's history now that it didn't work out. I returned to Melbourne as 9/11 crippled the world and in a state of deep sorrow. WE kept contact with each other for perhaps another year and that was that, over and out.
Till the other week.
It was a Saturday when I was online and browsing Facebook when I saw one of my friends had a new contact with a person who shared the same surname as Tania. On impulse I typed her full name into the search box, and much to my surprise saw her profile and her picture pop up on screen. It was her, the woman I remembered. For long moments I stared at the picture disbelievingly, as if it was the last thing I expected. But there she was.
The temptation was to fire off a quick message, hey, guess who, how you going? I didn't though. Instead I went about my business before going to bed. In bed I found much I had forgotten of that time come back to me. I lay in bed ruminating on our relationship and from the perspective of many years on pondering what I could have done differently. I concluded there was quite a lot, though without too much rancour.
In the week before I had met with Whisky and he told me a story of the woman he was falling in love with. Like Tania she had come to him at the crucial time and told him she was likely to be heading back to London, where she had a house. Whisky had said nothing, neither for or against, and had sensed she was upset by this.
Over a beer I told him that was the worst thing he could have done. He needed to say something and, I thought, the best thing was to be honest with her: tell her how you feel, tell her how you don't want her to go, explain that you understand but want her to stay. I told him that more than anything else she was looking for reassurance. She wants to feel loved and cherished, she wants to know that it matters to you, and that her future is wrapped up in hers.
I had little doubt as I spoke that what I said was true - and as I did I realised the irony in the situation. I was advising him to do the thing I had not. Stupidly I had taken the (characteristically) selfless tack with Tania, had looked upon it objectively and sacrificed any feelings I might have in the service of what I thought was the greater good.
It might have made no difference at all, but I should have spoken from the heart, should have been unreasonable. I should have told her that I understand the dilemma but I don't want you to go. I should have told her I loved her and that her future was with me - be it here in Melbourne or in Singapore or anywhere else. I should have been true to what I felt; instead I was reasonable.
Lying in bed thinking that all these years later was almost liberating. I've long since recovered from my disappointment and any consideration of what might have been is no more than that now. I was glad to think it though because it was the truth revealed, and in its revelation was the proof that I have learned. that was a seminal relationship for me in a multitude of ways, and I look upon it now much as the relationship I had to have if I was to mature as a man. For all the pain I felt at the time it made me a better man. With that thought I fell asleep.
The next day I resolved to write to Tania. I was not sure if it was appropriate after all these years, but considered if she thought it not she would not respond to me. I wrote a simple email and sent it off. Within a couple of hours she had answered, how delightful to hear from you after all this time...
We exchanged a couple of further small messages and in those I learned she was back in Australia and that she had a 5 year old boy. That gave me pause to think in bed that night. This time it was to wonder at the things I have missed out on. Perhaps in another universe that boy would have been mine. I was taken aback. For a little while I felt it deeply, not her, not the boy who might have been, but rather the absence of what I might normally have expected for myself. I looked it was not there.
I woke and once more whatever I had felt the night previous was processed. Time to move on, I thought. I had been curious to hear of Tania again, to reconnect with her briefly, but our time was long ago and had long passed. In general I don't believe love can come twice with the same people. It springs up between two people in a time and a place made for it, nurtured by the environment you live in. It is an unlikely event in much the same way conception is, a million to one shot made possible by a string of unlikely events becoming so. It takes at that time and so can last forever - or fails and falls away into the past.
This is what this is: part of the past. We exchanged some nice emails and then I let it go. I was glad to have had the opportunity to speak with her again, and feel better for it - but it is to the future I must turn. One more stone turned.
