STID: And so we begin

It’s quite amusing that I go worked up on Monday, wrote up a big spiel about disclosure and opening up, and then promptly got tired and went to bed. It seems disclosure took a back seat to the fine art of crashing and burning. So here I am a few days later, having written out a brief outline of what I want to get down, realising how long it will take and deciding that maybe hiding behind the curtain isn’t such a bad idea after all. Never fear, dear readers, I shall drag it out with a hook and a stick.

Part 1: The Hook and Stick

After some very stressful and at times bizarrely awkward phone calls and a month or so of extremely long e-mails, T and I re-hooked up earlier this year. They say hindsight is everything and I guess looking back it was done for the right reasons and the right justification but with a near criminal disregard for both our personal history. If the wonderfully delicious roasting and burning demise or our previous time together taught me anything it was that I am not a person who deals well with long distance relationships. Why the hell go for it again then? Well, before I tackle that particular doozy, let me bitch about LDRs for a while first.

I’m of the opinion that long distance relationships are a war of attrition between the couple involved and the fat guy slouched in the corner with distance written across his chest. If you can deal with distance long enough to ride the gap between physical visits, it can work. The second it starts to become an issue, when communication starts to break down, that right there is the beginning of the end. I suppose if you want to look at it cynically, it’s over the second you step on that plane and you’re just buying time with every rushed visit overseas and late night phone call. And me, if anything, I’m cynical.

T and I had been battling that particular demon pretty much since the get go. In Uni, way back when, she was happily sharehousing in the student slums surrounding good old Bentley campus but come the end of semester and it was back to Malaysia to do the family thing. Once we wound up lectures, swore off the tav and got our little pieces of paper that said we were designers we were, barring a few months here and there, always in different countries and counting the days until we next saw each other. The problem was with me pushing for Japan and her pushing for Australia we never had a solid end-point. There was no goal, nothing to aim for in the long term.

Time ticked by and our lives started moving on in double time; she got a job in the big city and I made the move over to Japan. It stayed as a month by month thing and you know what, for a while, it wasn’t too bad. Japan had so much to offer and there was so much change in both our lives that there was always something to talk about, funny stories to relate, crap about our new friends. My life felt full even though she wasn’t around.

Then came the factor.

To be continued in Part 2: The J Factor.

Posted in Mwah on Thursday October 13, 2005.