6

ON MY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, I got engaged. Six months later, I was single for the first time in almost ten years.

I was twenty-one when we met. A long arm had reached through a nightclub crowd and tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to say, you’re a good bass player, I like your band.’

I turned to look up at the blond boy who the arm belonged to. He was tall—really tall—so it was little wonder he was able to spot me through the crowd. ‘Cool, thanks,’ I mumbled dismissively.

It was one of our band’s first gigs and I was certain that we sucked, so I was taken aback by his compliment. He stepped past a couple of people and leaned down to ask me, ‘Do you listen to ESG? It sounded like that, really punk funk.’

‘What an obvious reference.’ I gave him an amused eye roll. I was trying to be cool, because, truthfully, I was intimidated. I recognised him. He was part of a new band that had a lot of industry buzz about them; four young guys who were all so angelic looking that they resembled a cast of models holding instruments in their music videos. I was sure that meant that he was a fuckboi, probably constantly surrounded by model-looking girls and party leeches. A few blond locks fell over his forehead as I looked up at his deep blue eyes, his delicate nose. He’ll be an arsehole for sure, I told myself, deciding it would be best if I scurried away from him. And after we exchanged those minimal words, I did just that.

Gradually, though, we became friends. My early judgement of Ben as an arrogant scenester couldn’t have been further from the truth. He was loyal and grounded, and eventually our relationship turned from friendship to romance. He was open with his devotion and played no games whatsoever. He was the first to say I love you, and I knew I felt the same when we watched Howl’s Moving Castle and he ran out to get us pizzas and ice cream. He blocked my ears when we were in bed and we could hear his housemate peeing in the bathroom next to us. He played Sebastien Tellier’s ‘La Ritournelle’ on repeat one morning and said it could be a great wedding song. Everyone who has heard that song thinks that, I thought, myself included. He was infinitely sweet, and his family were so wholesome I sometimes felt like a cynical troll in comparison. He was also the bass player in his band, immensely more talented and experienced than me, and when I told him I wanted to move to London with the band, he encouraged me to take the leap and consoled me when I came home crying the day I quit my radio gig. We did long distance for those three years, with him visiting me in the UK every summer and me flying back to Australia every Christmas.

The Mariglianos loved Ben. I was enchanted by how perfectly we slotted into the approved roles in my family. He drank liquor with the men after dinner as I stood by Nonna’s side in the kitchen. ‘When you make a baby, the baby have blue eyes,’ Nonna would say, smiling knowingly. I’d never introduced my family to a boyfriend before him, because it wasn’t the done thing to introduce them to more than one person in a lifetime. My Italian cousins had married their high school sweethearts, and there was an expectation that when you chose someone, you chose for life.

Even my mother, who in time had resumed her true nature as a woman most difficult to impress, adored him. Ben was accepting of her forceful personality even as it seeped into our life. He knew that we had to clean the house from top to bottom if we suspected she might pop in to visit, because the first thing she’d point out, before even saying hello, would be whether or not the floors were mopped. He knew there were certain eccentric things that she would insist on, and he went along with all of it because, more than everything else, he loved me. I loved him and, perhaps just as much as that, I loved seeing him happy. I enjoyed accepting the gift of his affection and, in turn, receiving the approval of our collective friends and family.

Then, on my thirtieth birthday, he asked me to marry him.

The night before, he had thrown me a party with all of our friends. He’d booked an intimate club in the city, and at midnight our friend Stef emerged carrying a massive multi-tiered chocolate cherry cake. It made me think of the gargantuan cake that gets served to Bruce Bogtrotter in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I sunk my face into a fluffy, soft slice on the dancefloor. There seemed nothing more indulgent than dancing with a piece of cake and no flimsy paper plates, no forks, no Mum looking over my shoulder disapprovingly while chirping, ‘Watch your waist, Linda.’ There was cake on my fingers and on my face, and I was laughing at my friend Georgia, who screamed out jokingly, ‘Let’s find the ring in the cake! Surprise engagement! Surprise engagement!’ Several of my friends joined in, chanting along and laughing hysterically. Miska was dancing next to me, wiping icing off my nose as I cackled, but I noticed that Ben had stiffened up while standing near the DJ decks. He wasn’t laughing along; he just looked awkward. Broad shoulders slightly raised, blue eyes darting worriedly about the room. I wondered why he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself, but figured he was just in stressed organiser mode, making sure that everything and everyone was taken care of. As more of my friends gathered on the dancefloor I lost sight of him, until we all dragged ourselves home in the blissfully early hours of the morning.

The next day, my actual birthday, we juxtaposed the boisterous party with a quiet dinner for two. I tucked a teal silk shirt into linen pants and felt sophisticated as we ordered scallops and wine at a fancy restaurant. Small portions on big plates echoed our small talk in a big space. Our conversation was stilted—Ben was oddly polite throughout the whole dinner. I watched him fidgeting between courses and imagined he was just hungover from the party the night before. The minimal house beats were a little too loud, the restaurant’s high ceilings bouncing the drum patterns around the room. I figured we needed a change of scenery, and an indulgent dessert. We paid the bill, then promptly scooted outside and into a cab.

Ben chose our next destination, and we pulled up outside a tiny French cafe that was always open late. We had sloshed our way there from a nightclub on the night of our first kiss almost ten years earlier. The cafe was forever lively, with a charming, crammed energy. Taxi drivers working night shifts loitered outside smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, leaning against their cars. Solo dwellers sat inside at tables reading books and eating toasted sandwiches at all hours. Floor-to-ceiling paintings and posters lined the walls. I looked through the glass counter and pointed out a sticky date pudding—a dense slice of gooey heaven. While Ben paid, I walked to a free table against the front window.

Laying my caramel coat on the back of a chair, I sat down and looked around the inside of the cafe. I spied the pile of fashion magazines I loved idly flicking through on a table by the back wall.

Ben walked over, and I smiled. ‘Ooh, actually, can you grab us some magazines?’

I stayed seated, pouring water from a glass bottle into chipped plastic cups, while he fetched the magazines. I realised he hadn’t uttered a single word since we had entered the cafe. As he approached the table with a handful, he looked like he was about to shit himself. Jesus. How hungover is he? I wondered. The place had started smelling like my pudding, which was currently being blasted in the microwave. He looked worried as he sat down, plonking a little pile of outdated Vogues on the square, slightly sticky table. I noticed a lump between the pages, causing the top magazine to hump out. Had someone left something behind after reading it? I lifted the magazine from the top of the pile and flicked it open. I gasped. A small maroon velvet box.

For a micro moment as I made sense of it, my heart felt like it was resting at the top of a terrifying rollercoaster, before lurching forward and dropping into oblivion. A ring box. I was genuinely shocked. Getting engaged and married was not something I had thought about at all. Words began falling out of me in clumps before he could speak. I was bumbling.

‘Oh my god. Oh my god, umm. Please. Don’t get up. Please don’t make a big deal. Do not get up, but do not get down on a knee. Oh my god, please. Don’t make a big scene.’

He was looking back at me with concerned eyes, taken aback by my verbal diarrhoea. I was embarrassed, thinking about how we looked to the rest of the cafe and the several cab drivers smoking just outside the window. Had people noticed? Were they looking? Shit. Why was I being so fucking awkward? I knew I should be jumping up and down for joy, enjoying the attention and display of love and affection. But instead my body froze, shoulders hunched up.

I had a sudden series of flashbacks to similar interactions between my mother and father over the years. Dad would return home from work on Valentine’s Day holding his hairdressing man-bag in one hand and a bunch of perfect roses in the other. He’d walk through the door with a big grin and open arms, and my mother would frown immediately and shoo him away, with a sharp-tongued, ‘Uhh! Why did you bother getting those things, Michael? What a stupid waste of money. I don’t want them and they cost so much today, ugh, put them in a vase. I don’t know why you get those when you know I don’t care.’

Meanwhile, Ben had sunk down onto the chair next to mine, cautiously waiting for me to shut the fuck up. When I did, he spoke quietly and slowly, like he was soothing a skittish rescue dog.

‘I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you … Will you marry me?’

We’d been together for a smooth nine and a half years. We’d barely argued. He was a good man. There seemed only one logical answer in the moment.

‘Yes, yes, of course!’ I rushed back my answer, not even thinking about it. I wanted the moment to be over as swiftly as possible. I leaned forward in my chair and hugged him, then gave him a quick kiss. Moments later, my steaming-hot sticky date pudding arrived, and a melting scoop of vanilla ice cream slid along the side of the plate as Ben slid the ring on my finger.

My insides were turning over themselves with uneasiness. Why did I feel so confused? Ben had intended this to be a tasteful and loving moment for us, in a charming environment that held historical tenderness. It was perfect, wasn’t it? His happiness relied on an enthusiastic ‘yes’, and giving in to that expectation was the natural step forward. I rationalised it in my head as I ate my pudding. If I wasn’t inclined to break up in that very moment, then what other choice did we have? It was a good relationship that ticked the loyalty and love boxes. We took a photo of me wearing the ring in plain sight, smiling outside the little French cafe, and the next day we sent it to our family and close friends, which resulted in an absolute onslaught of excitement. The joy was infectious, and I was glad to have pleased them so immensely. I could see our parents’ ecstasy that we were getting married after being together for so long; their anticipatory happiness that the ‘natural step’ of having a baby would come next. One of Ben’s brothers sent a card saying how pleased they were to welcome me into their family, and I caught myself bitterly wondering if I hadn’t already been a ‘welcome’ part of their family for the past nine-odd years. I should have been happy, but there was something in me that felt hollow.

Despite being in a long-term relationship, and seeing friends and family getting married around me, I had never really thought about having a wedding. Was it getting married in general that I was fearful of? All the traditional frills that came with a wedding? The outdated duty of it all? Or was it getting married to him that I was uncomfortable with? Was his proposal, the dreaded ‘forever question’, the tipping point to me realising that I didn’t want to be in the relationship?

I went to work as usual the Monday after the proposal weekend. Despite my previous manager’s prediction, I had been offered a nightly radio show upon returning from London, at the very same station I had quit three years earlier. As people in the open-plan office noticed the ring on my finger, I couldn’t help but feel repulsed by everyone’s enthusiasm. The more that people commented how happy I must be, the more my gut recoiled. I wished I hadn’t worn the ring to work then I mentally slapped myself for thinking such horrible things. I told myself to relax and enjoy the moment. Every time I stiffened up, I pictured Ben’s nervous proposal face, bordering on hurt, when I was curtly barking at him to stay still. I thought of his mother’s voice when she called us, her soft South African accent cooing over what sort of wedding we would have. Everyone was so happy for us.

The months passed quickly. We started making a list of wedding guests, the sort of food we’d like and the venue we could picture it all happening in. We visited a few places but I would find something fatally flawed about each one, halting our wedding plans for yet another weekend.

‘It’s okay. We don’t need to rush,’ I started to say. ‘This place is too wedding-y, we need to find somewhere that’s right for us.’

People were constantly bringing our pending marriage up in conversation, so I began to avoid the topic, remaining vague and casual in my answers. With a well-rehearsed smile and presenter-like poise I knew how to keep the mask of excitement on. But it was getting harder to ignore the discomfort sitting deep within me.

A few months after the proposal, we were nestled in bed late at night, faces lit by my bright laptop as we watched a TV show. I saw him begin to nod off, his eyelids growing heavy. His head plonked onto the pillow beside me. I wasn’t tired yet. I considered continuing the show without him, but instead I clicked open the photo gallery on my laptop. Tiny tiles of images from over the years were splayed across the screen in an instant. Almost ten years’ worth of pictures together. Slowly, I began to open them.

Him and me in matching bathrobes in Vanuatu.

Him laughing, towering over my Chinese uncles in Malaysia. Me next to him, holding a bag of rambutans.

A selfie of our heads, in the sunshine, lying in the tall grass at Hampstead Heath in London. My mind flashed back to a moment right before he landed that first summer of our long-distance relationship. As I’d shampooed my hair in the shower that morning, I had thought to myself, I’m actually happier on my own. If I clicked my fingers and our relationship disappeared, I would be okay. I wouldn’t have to come home for our Skype call each night. At the time, I was horrified at myself for casually pondering a life without him, and as I rinsed the shampoo from my hair I made sure the idea also washed down the drain. That fleeting shower thought popped up a few more times when I was alone in London, but I washed it away each time. Maybe that was the earliest indication that I was slipping out of my commitment to him.

I closed the Hampstead Heath photo, squashing the memory. I opened another photo of us at his sister’s wedding, me in a cheongsam dress and him in a suit, pulling funny faces with the rest of his family as we crammed into a group photo.

I stared at us over the years—our relationship had been long and joyous. I could see our history there on my screen. Could I imagine our future? We had become a couple when I was twenty-one, and he was just a few years older. We had been babies. I knew I wasn’t the same person I had been ten years earlier and neither was he. Had we grown together? Or had we just grown, twisted and branched off in our own directions? He was ready for a family, and I … I simply couldn’t make myself excited for that life just yet.

Still, the thought of hurting him was too much for my brain to handle. It was natural for relationships to shift into different gears over the years, and maybe my lack of giddiness—or dare I say, increased apathy—was simply a level of ‘comfort’ that everyone enjoys a decade into a partnership. We didn’t clash overtly, we had sound values and interests that overlapped. Whichever way I looked at it, he was a great partner. So what right did I have to up-end it all?

I was still clicking on photos while he snored contentedly by my side. I gave myself a stern pep talk. ‘How could you even consider giving this up? Can you really look at these memories and walk away from them? Of course you’re going to get married. How can you hurt this man? Look at your families. How can you disappoint them? Everything is entangled.’

And that was it. With a warped sense of duty and a cutthroat fear of letting down the people who mattered to me, I convinced myself to stay.

This walk down memory lane became a nightly routine. Ben’s head would peacefully nod off, and with a few faint taps I would give myself a tour of the visual cues of our radiant relationship. I was slow and obsessive, going through the years meticulously, falling asleep exhausted and ashamed of my new habit. But it was a superb weapon with which to wield my guilt, and it worked. If I couldn’t progress with wedding plans, at least I had found a way to stop going backwards and undoing all the years we had spent together. It was relationship paralysis. After a while, I didn’t even need to be in front of my laptop with the gallery laid out before me. I could be anywhere, and my mind would wander towards the heart-aching unknown of what would happen if I dared to be honest and leave the relationship. Every time this happened, my brain rebutted by slamming a photo memory to the forefront.

There was one in particular that I would draw out in my darkest moments. The two of us sitting outside a temple in Ipoh, Malaysia. Sweating in the thirty-five degree heat, our skin was tanned and dewy. A holiday glow. We’d bought water spinach off a tiny, wrinkled woman by the entrance and hand-fed the turtles in the temple garden. My hair was cut short and pixie-like. His was long and tied back. He was wearing a patterned, breezy short-sleeved shirt. His arms were lean and muscular, resting forward on his legs. I had loved those forearms. We were smiling so warmly at the camera. Behind us the monumental temple rose, and either side of us were colourfully painted statues of Buddhist idols, and huge leafy plants. It was a great day. You will never find someone as good as this, I told myself.

I started going out without him. A signature escape route for many an avoidant lover. Memories of my parents sprung to mind; the way my mother escaped our home for the salsa studio in the year leading up to the divorce. Was this her story repeating? I had witnessed firsthand the disapproval my family was capable of in the wake of my parents’ separation. I had been part of the disapproval. And now I was slipping into my own pattern of disengagement. It was identical to the one I had watched over ten years earlier, when my parents slowly began to pull apart at the seams. I didn’t want to become my mother’s daughter in my Italian family’s eyes; I didn’t want to be accused of being the same sort of ‘fickle woman’ who abandons a loyal and loving ‘good man’. There had been comments from my aunts and uncles about how much I now physically resembled my mother. Was I going to act like her, too?

I pressed those thoughts down during the week and drank them away on the weekends, spending time with friends in circles that I hadn’t cared for in years. None of my closest friends knew what was going on. I wasn’t ready to say it out loud, for fear of it becoming real. I began accepting DJ bookings interstate on the weekends, under the guise of making a bit of extra pocket money for our wedding budget. I’d fly out on a Saturday afternoon, returning on the Sunday evening after a late night DJing at a club on the other side of the country. It was a convenient and cowardly ‘out’ to avoid any wedding venue weekends with him. After a while, he stopped suggesting it altogether.

Before long, I started going out during the week, too. My evening radio shift was a terrific excuse. I’d finish work between 9 and 10 pm and decide that I should pop my head in at a colleague’s work drinks or a gig nearby. There was always an invitation, and I told myself it was good to be networking in the music scene, gushing things to Ben like, ‘I won’t be long, you go enjoy a relaxing night in. This is a fucking chore but I promised [insert person’s name who didn’t give a shit whether I turned up or not] that I’d swing by.’ Attending those random events was more appealing than going straight home, but I never let myself think too carefully about why I was avoiding my fiancé. An unspoken sadness lingered in the air when I was home, like he knew I’d rather be elsewhere but was too nice to ask me about it. So I dodged the sadness at all costs and went to the dumb record industry nights instead. Not once did I invite him to join me.

Ben grew quieter, more passive. I could see I was hurting him but I felt like I had nowhere to turn. A self-loathing guilt flared alongside any thoughts about what it would be like to leave the relationship. Your relationship is perfect, Linda! There are no flaws! Stop doing this!

One Saturday night, I was standing by the front door calling a cab to go meet some friends. Ben was sitting in the dining room. It was a rare weekend where I wasn’t away DJing but my friends were throwing a club night I was adamant I needed to be at.

‘You don’t love techno—don’t bother coming, it’ll be so intense,’ I had told him that evening, dismissively.

As I swung open the front door to leave, the cool night air hit my face like a slap of freedom. When I turned back to say goodbye to him, the inside of the house was silent and stuffy.

‘Bye, honey, love you,’ I called out.

He was sitting at the end of our dining table, eating his dinner alone. He looked up.

‘Love you,’ he said, then paused. ‘And I don’t mind if you go out every night …’ He paused again, then added, ‘You can go out all you want, as long as you come home to me.’

‘My god, of course, love you,’ I told him quickly, in a voice dripping in unconvincing sincerity. I wanted to cry. I hated myself in that moment. I shut the door behind me. He’s sad. He knows you’re avoiding him. You should be going back in and watching a movie like a good girlfriend, or else having a hard conversation with him. What the fuck are you doing?

Instead I waited for my cab out on the cold road outside our home. It never arrived, but I didn’t take that as a hint. I ordered another cab, and when it turned up I got in and didn’t get home until 3 am.

The guilt became overwhelming. I found myself wanting to leave all the time. The mental photo slamming wasn’t working anymore. And my mind couldn’t shake the deep sorrow I’d heard in his voice that night as he sat alone at the dining table. We couldn’t go on like this. It was clearly tearing us both up inside. I needed to make a call on whether I could stay with him. I wanted to want to. I wanted to shake some logical sense into myself. Perhaps I could kick myself back into gear. I could stop being such a shitty person.

So, two weeks on from that sad Saturday night, I messaged him while I was on air.

Wanna come meet me after work tonight for a Chinatown dessert adventure?

Of course he accepted—it was the first time his fiancée had invited him out in months.

He met me just after I finished work at 10 pm, and we strolled pleasantly down the main bustling strip of Chinatown. Stalls with dumplings, phone trinkets, meat skewers, and sugar cane juice were still lively. People were spilling out of the bubble tea shop on the corner. Others were lining up for the emperor’s cream puffs at the neon-lit bakery. We finally landed at one of our old favourites, a late-night spot that served Malaysian Chinese cuisine. We ordered char kway teow, congee with fried bread sticks and an iced Milo to share.

Our food arrived, the bright orange plastic plates reminiscent of the times we had visited my Malaysian family. A perfect scene. I had essentially recreated one of the photos I’d been poring over of late. I was playing the same scolding speech in my head again, Can you really look this man in the eyes, this man who is looking back at you with such love, and say goodbye to all this? DO NOT DO IT TO HIM.

We left the restaurant and walked through the backstreets of Chinatown, winding our way through alleys and past cafes that were still full of loud and vibrant diners. He reached out and took my hand. I looked up at his kind face, lit by the streetlights. I went through our family members in my head, I thought of the engagement ring he was only able to afford by selling the motorcycle he’d loved so much. Can you live with letting down all of those people, rupturing this good thing you’ve got going? Almost instantaneously, I answered myself shamefully: Yes. I looked away from his face, concentrating on the stalls around us and biting down hard on my lip to stop myself from crying.

The next morning he woke early. I hadn’t stumbled home at 2 am, so his sleep had been restful for the first time in a while. I heard him whistling throughout the house. I sat up in bed and wanted to vomit. I’d always thought when people said their stomach was in knots it was just a saying, but the forceful washing machine gut I was experiencing suggested otherwise. I went to the bathroom, washed my face and looked in the mirror. I was sickened by the thought of hurting him, of having to explain it to my family. But there was a tiny voice inside me screaming among the churning, ‘Get it done, get it done, GET IT DONE!’

I walked into the kitchen. There were a couple of mugs and a plate left over from the day before, sitting in the drying rack. I started silently putting them away and heard him enter the kitchen behind me.

‘Should we go for a walk for coffee?’ he asked. His voice sounded lighter and brighter than it had in weeks.

I placed a mug on the shelf above my head, my back to him.

‘No.’ I took a deep breath in. ‘We should talk about our relationship.’

As the words fell from my mouth, I slowly turned to face him. He sighed loudly, sadly. He pulled out a dining chair and sank into it, the weight of our inevitable breakup hitting him. He appeared instantly defeated, his tall body folded over in the chair. His elbows were on the table, his head in his hands. He didn’t look up at me. I started to cry.

‘I’m so sorry, Ben.’ I slipped into the chair opposite him. ‘I haven’t been in this relationship for a long time. I just didn’t know how to say it. I haven’t been happy.’

His head remained down, and he didn’t look at me when he spoke.

‘I don’t know what to say, Linda. I don’t think you want to do this. If it’s the wedding … we don’t have to get married.’

‘It’s not that.’ I shook my head, tears dripping onto my t-shirt. ‘I’ve just realised how I’ve been feeling deep down for a really long time. And I haven’t been fair to you. I’m so, so sorry.’

He sat silently, still looking down at the table. I glanced up at the clock above the kitchen sink: 9.26 am. I could hear it ticking; loud and definite. I couldn’t believe that a life-changing decision that had taken me six months to realise had only taken three minutes to execute.

Finally, Ben looked up. ‘I’m not going to beg you, Linda. I want you to be happy.’

‘I know.’ I sniffled. ‘I love you, and I’ll always have love for you.’

I really meant that. He nodded slowly at me, accepting the words with miserable eyes. Even in his heartbreak, he was civil and elegant. It made me feel even worse. I almost wanted him to be an arsehole, to be angry, but his kindness merely reminded me that I was rejecting something perfect and good.

I stared at the deafening clock again, then got up and walked numbly into our bedroom. I pulled tissues out of a box next to the bed and blew my nose, then wiped my eyes. He walked in after me and grabbed his backpack, stuffing clothes into it messily. I sat on the bed watching him, apologising over and over. He was going to his parents’ house, he said. I told him he didn’t need to leave. But he zipped up his backpack and put it on, looking like a small, lost child being forced to walk through the school gates alone. He took a couple of strides out of our room, then turned back to face me.

‘I’m going to miss you so much.’ His voice broke, and he finally burst into tears.

I am a fucking monster, I thought.

A few hours later, my dazed little body got on a plane and flew to Melbourne for a DJ gig. When I walked into my hotel room after doing my set at the club, I threw myself onto the big clean bed and slept a dreamless sleep. I hadn’t stayed out late after my set—there was no need, I wasn’t escaping anything anymore. When I woke on the Sunday morning I felt something I hadn’t felt in what seemed like forever. Freedom. Our conversation the day before was a tragic blur, and I hated thinking about the hurt I had caused. But there was also a tiny seedling of pride that had sprouted within me. Pride in an honesty that had taken me months, and truthfully, years, to own up to. I spent the afternoon alone at an art gallery, and I felt like I could breathe again. I had shaken the guilt for a few hours.

It was dark by the time I flew home on Sunday evening. Stepping through our front door filled me with the heavy-heartedness I had largely avoided throughout the last day. The house was dark, he wasn’t home. I made my way cautiously to the bedroom, not bothering to turn on any lights. Something felt off. When I got to our bedroom, I hesitated for a moment. The door to the study, where Ben worked during the week, had been left wide open.

Oh no. What were those?

I clicked the light switch on.

Oh. FUCK.

Laid out across the entire work desk were greeting cards. Every single one of the cards I’d given to him over the years was standing up, facing me, taking up the entire length of the large desk. Nine and a half years’ worth of greeting cards on display—a card for every birthday, anniversary, Christmas and Valentine’s Day. It must have been almost forty cards. He had kept every single one. I was shocked. Even standing back from the desk, I could see that within each card was a delightful emotional outpouring; laden with sweetness, in-jokes and excited references to the future like ‘This is going to be your best year yet!’ and ‘Soulm8s for life!’ I kept staring at them. The precise placement of them. Like how I used to display my birthday cards and school certificates as a child. Naive soldiers battling for our love. An exhibition of our hard work, dedication, passion and compatibility as a couple for almost a decade. They were curated in lines which gently curved around a new card in the centre, right at the front of the desk. It was an A4 piece of paper, folded in half, resting horizontally. A centrepiece with one line of text facing me, in capital lettering.

‘LINDA, WE CAN WORK THIS OUT’.

A wave of shame hit me. Besides the stifled proposal, this was by far the grandest gesture of love I had ever experienced. The reality of owning my actions was sinking in. Our families would know. Our friends would know. I had undone it all. I wasn’t ready for that.

Yet, I also remembered what I had felt earlier that day. The seedling of pride. No matter how much the guilt threw me in that moment, it was surpassed by this realisation: I didn’t have to perform anymore. No more hiding behind DJ sets and wedding venues and random outings after work. I had felt optimistically alone in Melbourne, freer than I had in years. I held on to that feeling tightly.

Stepping towards the cards, I reached my arm out and knocked every single card over, sweeping them along the length of the desk and onto the floor. They lay there in a jagged pile. I could see my detailed loopy handwriting from his birthday card five years ago glaring up at me. I turned around, walked two steps back to the door and flicked off the light.

The next morning I got up and shuffled my arse into the study. The cards were still in their messy mountain on the floor. I crouched down next to them. I knew that if I took a seat on the floor, to open and caress each card and the story it held inside, that I could successfully guilt myself back into the relationship.

I picked up the pile of cards, walked back to the bedroom and stuffed them into the bottom of my underwear drawer.

It was time to tell my parents. I visited my dad at home, and stood with him in the kitchen as I confessed that I had broken up with Ben. Dad was, of course, disappointed to hear about our split, but overwhelmingly supportive and loving.

‘H’are you sure this is what you want to do?’

I nodded. ‘It is, Dad.’

My father reached out and hugged me tight. I could smell the pasta sauce he had simmering on the stove, and the scent of the tomato and garlic was comforting.

I thought I was all out of tears but he dragged more out of me by saying, ‘I will h’always support you. You’re still my little girl but I’m going to miss my son-in-law,’ he said sadly. ‘I’m going to miss my h’evening drinking buddy.’

Dad loved bonding with Ben over a slowly sipped homemade limoncello after dinner. My sentimental father and Ben were similar in temperament so they had always gotten along well.

‘I know you will,’ I said. ‘You should text him, I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.’

A week later, I told my mother as we ate dinner in front of the TV at her apartment. We had jasmine rice, bitter melon and egg, stir-fried gai lan and steamed tofu laid out on the coffee table. I was sitting on a pillow on the floor when I reached over and muted the reality show we were watching.

She slapped her bare thigh and cried out immediately after my news, ‘Oh no, Linda, he’s a good man! Why did you do that!’ She was frowning at me, shaking her head.

‘I couldn’t do it, Mum. I know he’s a good person, I know that. But it just didn’t feel right for me, for a long time, and I didn’t want it to get worse if we got married, and then we had kids. I couldn’t do it. I think you might know what that feels like, Mum.’

She went quiet, which was rare for a woman who normally yapped at the heels of my sentences with her opinions. I still vividly recalled our emotional phone call on the night of her and Dad’s divorce announcement, and the admission that she had been unhappy for years, but keeping up a front. I had now learned, through my own experience, that the only thing worse than a relationship ending, was staying in one that had ended long ago.

Mum started nodding slowly, and I could see her studying my face. She reached out and patted my thigh.

‘Don’t worry, Linda—you know what? You are like me. We don’t need anybody.’ She kept going, her tone confident now, ‘You’re a good career girl and you’re going to be a very, very good aunty to your brother’s kids.’ My brother Sam now had a family of his own. He and his girlfriend Omm had married a few years earlier, and she’d given birth to a little boy named Archie, who was now two years old. My parents and I were certain they would have another child for us all to obsess over before too long. My mum continued talking, more enthusiastic now: ‘And we can go travel. We can go to Malaysia together or to Europe, you know I want to go back to Europe with a couple of good girlfriends. We already talking about it.’

I didn’t quite agree that at the age of thirty there was zero hope of me ever finding love again, and that I should dedicate my life to my career and being an aunt while jetsetting around the world with my mother, but her narrative was entertaining.

‘Sure. We can go shopping together.’

I unmuted the TV, and after we ate dinner I booked us tickets for a weekend in Melbourne later in the year. It wasn’t Malaysia, but it gave Mum a giddiness that smoothed over any lingering disappointment.

I drove home that night, still fearful of what I’d set myself up for. But I’d made a decision and I felt compelled to back myself for once. I would have to tell my friends—who, typically, I hadn’t shared any of my doubts with—and work colleagues, and they would be supportive and accepting, because they weren’t judgemental monsters, they were good, kind people. I changed lanes and wondered what a genuine love in my thirties might look like. I decided that the next time I fell in love, it would only be about me and the other person—a separate, pure kind of love.

I could hear a familiar synth pattern on the radio. Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ blared through the speakers, and I turned it up loud and let the beats fill my hatchback. The snares had such a slap to them, the keys such melancholy, and the lyrics spoke to me on that drive. A boy leaving his past behind to find truth and liberation in a new era, soundtracked by the most transcendent falsetto. I eased my window halfway down and let the camp anthem ring out through the suburban streets, interrupted only by the frequent jolts of the speed humps.