Miss Behavin' (About Pt 5)

MISS BEHAVIN’

Part 5

SG an I woke the next morning in our respective beds, pinching ourselves to double check it wasn’t just another dream like the many we’d had over the previous 5 years. It wasn’t. She was actually here and for the week that followed I all too willingly adopted the role of tour guide. Remember, I’d quit my job the week before and wasn’t due to start the next one until the week after. I was free as a bird!

Keen to capitalise on the precious few days SG was in my hemisphere, I slid into our usual WhatsApp banter that I fully understood that she was here with her sister but insisted on stealing her away for just one night because we still had to have a very important conversation i.e. about my lay-it-on-the-line letter. She said that the good impression I made on her sister had earned me an invitation to have dinner or a drink with them at least one night of their trip, but she couldn’t just ditch her sister for a night on her holiday. Fair enough. I decided to drop the matter for another time and we arranged for the 3 of us to have dinner somewhere near Coogee Beach that night.

Heading east after I picked The Tourists up from their hostel, I suggested we could just get some fish 'n chips and sit on the sand as the sun set. How lovely. SG swiftly reminded me that she hated fish, and so did her sister. So much for that idea. We ended up going to a tiny little Italian place along the main drag instead. With a belly fully of pizza we headed down to the beach, kicked off our shoes and strolled along the sand just after dusk. I remember reaching for SG's hand, which was a little bit naughty now that I think about it because I wasn’t quite sure if “Dude” was still on the scene. Our fingers touched, then interlocked and my whole body went numb. Then after a moment or two she squeezed my hand tight and playfully tapped it away. That was all I needed.

The next day, April 1st 2015, The Tourists climbed the Harbour Bridge and the proceeded to run around Sydney ticking off a few other bucket list items. I had no plans to see SG — which was fine, I wanted to respect their time together, but I had to fight the overwhelming urge to ask if I could tag along with every ounce of my self-control. In a twist of fate SG’s sister came down with a massive headache cancelled their evening plans. Upon SG’s suggestion, I met her for a drink at the Australian Hotel — a 100-year-old pub virtually next door to their hostel.

We started off gently: she told me about her day and then I recounted mine, but we could only dance around the elephant in room for so long. Once all possible avenues of small talk had been exhausted we started to discuss my letter, which opened up into a broader conversation about us and our situation. According to a journal entry I made the very next day, this is what that chat revealed:

SG read the letter (before March 5th, but we won’t go there) and she let her mum read it too. Apparently “Dude" also found and read the letter. Oops. But she said that didn’t really matter because she wasn’t with “Dude" anymore; mainly due to the presence of significant family-related drama.

Repeating what I wrote in my March 5th letter, I explained that she was one of the only 3 things I needed in my life. She kept asking “how?”. I said that first and foremost, it was paramount that we both wanted the same thing to happen. It had to be a shared dream. Not just mine.

I pointed to the fact that it had been 5 years yet nothing had changed between us. It still felt right; exactly the same as when she was here the first time. She said “I know”, and kept asking “how? how can this work though?". It was clear that she was thinking about us in a very real way, so we then got talking about practical plans. We considered 2 options but in the end there was only one that we both felt made sense. That plan was this:

SG would move to Australia in September 2015. Unlike when we made this same plan in 2013, SG could now teach if she wanted to because she had all the experience she needed. But as she was sick of her job in UK and felt like her life was not going the way she wanted, SG was also prepared to get find work doing something different. In addition to all of this, SG already loved Australia and had intended on moving here for at least a year or two long before she met met. This was important because although she yearned for a new adventure, she expressed her need to at least feel like she was moving over for her own reasons, not for me; because if it didn’t work out she wasn’t sure how’d shed recover.

We then talked about how she’d dated people over the years who at first seemed nice but always just ended up treating her poorly. She said she was scared of being hurt again and scared of being so far away from her family; especially her mum because she was the person SG turned to her when things went wrong. She also voiced her concern that we didn’t really know who each other because we’d only seen little snippets of our respective personalities and lives over the internet for the last 5 years. Even if it was always nice and fun and lovely and easy, it wasn’t face-to-face. I tried my best to reassure SG and implored her to trust her feelings because they’d endured so much for so long. She said she "knew coming to Sydney wasn’t a good idea” and asked for some time to think about things. After that we went for a little walk around The Rocks, one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs. I tried to kiss her. She turned away. I let it go, said goodnight and drove home.

* * *

The next morning I made my way to the Tourist's hostel again as I’d been engaged to chauffeur them on a day trip to the Blue Mountains. Again, this was fine by me as it meant I simply had more time with SG. Wins all ‘round! We left early to avoid the horrendous peak hour traffic and the soft Autumn sun lit the way to our first stop: Featherdale Wildlife Park. Here we were able to get up close and personal with Australia’s iconic fauna; most of which I believe was either rescued or endangered. All the big names were there including koalas, wombats, platypuses, kangaroos, wallabies, emus, dingos, dozens of exotic native birds species and even a giant salt water croc. SG was chuffed and spent the whole time sporting that famous full-face ear-to-ear smile. I spent the whole time lost in it.

Waving goodbye to our fury friends, we hit the road again and chugged down the Great Western Highway in my little 2000 model Toyota Corolla. As SG’s sister sat in the back — and I did try my best to make her not feel like a 3rd wheel — while SG rode shotgun and DJ’d on a playlist I’d thrown together the night before; just as she’d done 5 years ago when we were driving up to Fingal Bay. (see chapter 4) It was filled with nostalgic songs that either reminded us of or made direct reference to those precious few weeks we shared in 2010.

I must admit, SG sitting just inches to my left made it incredibly challenging to concentrate on the road but thankfully we arrived at our destination without incident and then went about the usual sightseeing circuit. After admiring the breathtaking spectacle of the vast ancient canyon before us, we took some token photos with The Three Sisters before headeding around to ‘Scenic World' which boasted the steepest funicular railway in the world, the steepest aerial cable car in the Southern Hemisphere, a gorgeous boardwalk through the Jamison Valley’s temperate rain forest and the “Skyway”: a cable care with a glass floor that permitted unobstructed views of the pristine national park some 270 metres beneath.

Although the whole day was memorable, the Skyway is the thing that I remember the most because SG took this photo that now seems like the perfect visual metaphor for the complex conundrum we’d somehow stumbled into: 2 people, in a world of their own, standing face-to-face high above the ground, on solid yet fragile footing which could shatter at any moment and lead both to plunge into the depths below.

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***

After waking up slowly the next morning, I hopped in my little silver hatchback and wove through Sydney’s CBD to the Tourists hostel one last time. Being a Saturday morning, the city resembled a post-apocalyptic ghost town and this made for smooth sailing all the way to the airport. Parking was easy and check-in, a breeze. In fact, the only speed bump we encountered was at the departure gate: time to say goodbye. Well, sort of.

SG and her sister were bound sunny North Queensland and, after spending the week snorkelling on our world-famous Great Barrier Reef, they’d return to Sydney for one night and fly home to England the following day. Even though we’d made rough plans to see each other again on her final night “Down Under”, I was given no guarantee that this was going to happen. The dream was now closer than ever, and I thought I’d made my feelings perfectly clear but wanted to do something to communicate them beyond any possible doubt before she left. So just in case this was actually goodbye, after squeezing the life out of SG in Terminal 2 I presented her with an envelope along with strict verbal instructions not to open it until she got on the plane. Inside the envelope was a simple card with some heartfelt words and the engraved metal guitar pic she gave me for my 22nd birthday. I said in the card that she couldn’t have the pic forever because it was “one of most precious things I owned” (no exaggeration) and the fact that it was, therefore, too valuable to risk sending in the mail meant that I’d have to see her face to face at least one more time in my life to retrieve it. I intended for that to mean we’d have to actually follow through on a travel plan for once and meet up overseas mid year or something, but SG had other ideas.

Texting from her sandy slice of paradise on Airlie Beach, SG commended me on giving such a sneaky and clever gift. She asked when I was going to take it back. I said “it depends on a lot of things…”: was she going to try and give it back to me before she left Australia? Or was she happy to hold onto it for a while? I would’ve preferred the latter but SG said if I wanted to see her before flew home — which of course I did — then I had to let her return it then. Not prepared to forgo my last chance to see her, I reluctantly conceded. “Besides” SG said with tongue-in-cheek, “I feel like I deserve a better goodbye… You just walked off! No turn around!!… There I was waiting for you to turn around and wave again… But no… YOU JUST KEPT ON WALKING!”. I knew she was joking, but moved quickly to defend my actions nonetheless: “Do you want to know why?… I couldn't let you see my eyes…” which, at that very moment, were welling up with water because despite knowing that this wasn’t really “goodbye", the second I turned to walk away from SG a tsunami made of the many conflicting emotions I’d been trying to hold together since she arrived rose up and flooded my entire body. I was overwhelmed; almost entranced but by the time I found my corolla in Kingsford Smith’s huge car park I’d regained my composure and began to plan the best farewell in the history of such things.

Just like we did when she was here in 2010, over the next week SG and I checked-in every morning and night with a little lighthearted banter about our respective days and all sorts of other random things; including potential houses she could buy when she moved over later in the year. With each passing day our plans for her last night became more and more concrete: I’d pick the Tourists up from the airport, drive them to their nearby hotel and, if it was OK with her sister, hopefully kidnap SG for a little alone time. And in addition to a physical farewell, just 24 hours out from D-Day SG made a last minute request: "Can I be really greedy and ask you to write me another letter to read on the plane?”. I said "I’ll see what I can do”.

The stage was set. I sped towards the airport along the empty evening roads, visualising my ideal version of the next few hours over and over as if to wish it into existence and suppress the uncontrollable nerves in my stomach. Their flight landed on time at 9pm sharp. I met, collected and drove the Brits to their accommodation as arranged, and then virtually begged SG’s sister to let me steal her for a few hours. She agreed on the condition that SG was home no later than 11pm. Deal.

I then took SG on a mystery tour of Sydney that I’d spent the previous week planning to a meticulous degree of detail. I have a vague memory of blindfolding her so she couldn’t guess where we were going, but I could have that wrong. Anyway, first stop was Sidebar for a vodka raspberry - the place where it all started. Second: through Sydney Uni and past the college where we spent the vast majority our nights together. Third: to my apartment for miscellaneous activities. I assure you nothing happened though. Like, that’s not even a euphemism, we just hung out and tried to forget about the fact that we’d soon have to face reality again; so successfully that we completely lost track of time. Our bubble burst when SG’s sister began firing a flurry of worried texts asking where she was and why she wasn’t home as promised. It was 11:05 - fuck - so we quickly ran down stairs, jumped in the car and hurried back to the hotel. After a quick peck on the cheek to say goodnight, SG returned my treasured guitar pic and ran into the building while I floated home on cloud 9.

* * *

Fortunately, SG managed smooth over things with her sister and this meant I was still green lit to drive them to the airport to say one last au revoir. When I pulled up at the hotel the Tourists were waiting out the front with their bags. SG’s signature spark was MIA and so was mine. She slowly opened the door and slumped into passengers seat with a gentle thud. The click of her seat-belt cut through the silence like knife and, with no words spoken, an all-too familiar heaviness followed us down QANTAS Drive, through the check-in counter and finally, to the departure gate. This was it.

After thanking her sister for letting me tag along on their holiday, I turned to SG, paused for what felt like an eternity and embraced her in the middle of Sydney’s bustling international terminal for as long as I possibly could. When I finally mustered the courage to let go, I handed SG the letter she requested along with my favourite photo of us from the week just gone. Emblematic of our intentions for the future, we said “see you soon” instead of goodbye and then I stood, waved & watched until my teary-eyed SG disappeared behind the matte grey wall. 😭

Once SG was out of sight I took a deep breath and wandered aimlessly back to my car. I became immersed in a flashback to the moment I put her in taxi almost exactly 5 years earlier. At first, it felt like I was in a de ja vu, or a horrible recurring nightmare in which I repeatedly lost the only thing I wanted keep. But the initial sadness and sorrow soon gave way to sensations of joy, gratitude and hope because, unlike the last time which was shrouded in uncertainty and doubt, requiring me to run on belief that things would work out, I now had proof. So many little things happened that week; so many little signs and signals — some overt, others more subtle — that made me absolutely certain that everything would be fine and we were finally — definitely — on the same page. We had a plan; a shared vision of the future. The deal was done, and this filled me with a level of confidence that is hard to describe. But maybe if you read a little bit of the second half of SG’s leaving letter, you might get some idea of where my head was at:

(SG), I know I said this in your card, I know I said it last night and I’ll say it again, the last 2 weeks have been incredible. I can’t remember being this happy at all since the last time you were here. I cannot tell you how much it means to me that you came all the way out here again… [censored]

When I wrote you the last letter I wasn’t sure if we would ever see each other again. I wasn’t sure you even wanted to. I thought we were running out of time. I let doubt get the better of me. But now, every single inch of that doubt has been completely obliterated. The last 2 weeks have proved beyond any doubt in my mind that what I thought was there is definitely still there. Not just for me, but for you too. What we feel is real. It’s defeated time and space. It’s survived for 5 years and it will live for many more to come. I want this to work and I believe it can… [censored]

(SG), every second of this whole experience has been equally amazing and it would be impossible to choose a favourite moment. [We made memories] I will hold dear forever.

The lyrics at the start of this letter belong to a song I started writing after you left last time [Run Away]. The song was written not about you but to you, with the aim of helping you overcome the fears you have about us and what the future holds. I told you at the airport last night that I [our reunion inspired me to re-write] some lines for one of my songs. It was this one and the 2 lines were:

And if you’re doubting our survival

Think back to your surprise arrival.

So when you finally arrive home, and you settle back into your life in [England], and if you’re thinking us, questioning whether or not it could ever work. Think back to these to weeks. Remember how amazing they were and how our future will be even better.

See you soon.

All my love,

Always,

Cal xx

It was this chain of events and the confident mindset it produced that I used as inspiration when writing the last verse of Miss Behavin’. See below: