Every moment spent apart, and some together, were lacerating. She was balanced, upper middle-class, hope’s child. Me? The dark side of the moon to her, scarred by working-class collisions. My old car’s adjustable seats cranked back up, we often fondled between breathless silences following my bursts of outdated ideas about fidelity. I even secretly fantasised over which body part I would sacrifice by surgical amputation if it could ensure waking beside her each morning for the rest of my days as in…he would give his right arm for… I can’t remember where we parked; a grey trance of sky, a wasteland unlocatable now, the abandoned railway, iron stitched to weeds, the last train’s haunting whistle gone, gone.
Both carrying Norton anthologies like earnest Christians toting bibles we met in our first Thomas Hardy tutorial, then clicked in the student union café. Discovering we were both born in the same overseas district where Pope once lived, we showed off, wisecracking about grottoes. The messy ambience, overlapping dialogue, the bonhomie, in that sweet smoky slightly illegal atmosphere was a buzz yet I sensed disappointment ahead. Hardy was the first of our Seven Authors so I suspected destiny lurking like a starving wolf despite her telling me later I was great at kissing.
Movie fans, we also took Cinema Studies. According to some scripts discussed, our scenes agonising over her commitment might have died on the cutting-room floor. So, zero chance of lasting happiness. Feeling like a supporting act in her busy radiant life, my pre-determined adoration was more profound than her fondness for me. During lingering blandishments, the ragged breath of sexual urgency and various other moments of bliss, she never once gasped that she loved me. Trying for movie hero stoicism but weighted by infatuation’s non-reciprocal raw ache I dragged a wedge anchor of forever yearning fate.
Years come, go. I deliberately arrive in the semester break, tepid rain, wind gusts, a sky overcast with spasms of light, appropriate. The downtrodden escalator, its smell still musty familiar in the echoing Arts wing, grinds into action for a visiting ghost. I pause at the English faculty staff board, beyond it, those long corridors, office doors behind which poets presided, teachers I grew to know, heroic, their names replaced now, some dead. We both loved Wuthering Heights, and we could both write. I constructed credits, she burnished distinctions, her sentences always that bit better.
Where we last spoke, a spot on campus where she would wait for me, my dialogue hastily rehearsed, her face framed by a concert poster of a rising performer long since famous, I stop. Seeking more olfactory transportation I want another Proust phenomena, the waft of her patchouli oil, and to take back my bitter words. On long walks lulled by nature secluded clearings a car could reach quicken my heart. Much of my forever now up, her prophesy that we would both write about our relationship one day consoles eerily. Perhaps I should have brought flowers, taped them here where I blinded myself to the writing on the wall, keep people guessing before hiking my miserable sack of doomed bones the hell out of here.
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Ian C Smith's work has been widely published. He writes in the Gippsland Lakes region and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.