My mother often used to tell the story of how affectionate I was as I child, prone to hold onto the legs of strangers as they attempted to leave the house, much like one of those plastic koala souvenirs that clip onto pencils. I wonder how it was I was born to a family that did not provide physical affection when I was such a physically tactile child. Even to this day, hugging my family is strange, a habit that has formed since my father nearly died and we all grew somehow more demonstratively huggy in appreciation for each other. It wasn't as if I wasn't loved, as I certainly felt it. It's just that in retrospect, it was likely the oxytocin you get from hugs that I needed. I have an addictive personality.

The man I loved first wasn't demonstrative at all. He had other ways of showing me love, which I clung to desperately, until I unclipped myself from him in despair. I wanted to hold hands in public. I wanted public declarations of adoration. Perhaps if he hadn't been so emotionally stunted, I could have been content with the kind of love he had given me, but like the rattling, thumping, murmuring, quivering feelings that come over you when you don't have enough of something, I was full of dissatisfaction and searching for the hit I wanted. I was full of love with no where to place it, my skin was on fire and I imagined myself lonely. In the meantime, I discovered it was possible to drink on one's own. I sat on the front deck lighting one cigarette off another until the packet was gone. Eventually, I shook myself out of it and went travelling again.

As much as it feels childish and desperate now, part of leaving Australia was to find myself love. When you are in your twenties, you believe in the men charmings that were out there, somewhere. Alll you needed to do was keep looking. I'd had enough of Australian men, or perhaps the emotionally stunted men that I seemed to keep falling in with. I thought a lot about what draws women to the same men, over and over. The ones I loved were good men enough, and loyal. I certainly broke their hearts - it was me, not them. I'm sure they found happiness with woman just right for them. I'm ashamed to say I kept my options open. 'I'll be back,' I told the last one. 'I just need an adventure'. Still, he wasn't big enough to follow me, and I was strong enough to make him not want to, and think that was his idea.

Looking back, the love story I ended living is the entertaining one, and the story people love to hear - the day we met, the train ride across a flooded England to find him against the odds in the south, foregoing Paris for a cold weekend in his truck in Surrey, the three days it took to decide to get married. But there are more beautiful details I keep to myself because they'd lose shine in the telling, like the way his hands held a knife as he cut vegetables, or the grin he gave me as he spend his last two pounds on a vodka which he handed to me with a flourish, his own glass empty, the blue grey flint he gave me shot full of tiny flecks of starry quartz. I have a stack of these imaginary polaraids I flick through when I daydream about those years. I like them because they are mine and only mine.

As a young women, I was, like many young women, a relational being, needing someone to share my life with. Like many of my peers, relationships with men had previously been a strain and a struggle, requiring hardship and sacrifice and often a disconnection from my very self. It is difficult to imagine a life alone, a being-in-the-world without a partner. For many years I had focussed on this outer part of my life, unaware that it was I that could provide the tending to my heart, and loving too. Us girls told each other myths - that another completes the circle of ourselves, that there is one true love for everyone in the world. Believing ourselves unloved, we sought out relationships with other things to sedate the wild desire to connect to someone else. I wish I could reach across time and tell those young woman I knew, myself included, how our most important love was ourselves. Yes, we need others - we need to share stories, to speak our reality, to feel valued - but this does not need to be with the ever elusive perfect match, the Romeo to our fumbling and blind Juliet.

It was on a train to Bath that I realised completely that I was okay on my own, and that I did not need a relationship to complete me at all. I remember my forehead pressed to the glass, watching the streaks of leafless trees form black brushstrokes across the landscape as the train sped south and the muddy fields beyond, and closer, my distorted reflection and half smile of happiness. It was better than that. Being on my own was blissful. I could see myself moving through time and space as an intelligent, adventurous and creative young woman, a mother, a daughter, a friend - but not a lover, or a wife. That was, for the first time in my life, more than a reasonable proposition. It left me feeling open to possiblity, and weightless. I realised that I was my own circle, and that I needed no one to draw the other half. I wasn't even a half. I was a whole, complete, beautiful being, desiring for no one.

Image by me and Midjourney

Not an hour later I would see the person I would marry within the year in a doorway, the brother of my friend's friend, nodding at me after being introduced. I wonder whether we would have met at all, had I not decided to be free. The universe plays it's tricks.

Tomorrow, he turns fifty years old, twenty one years after we met. I look at our reflections in the mirror as we brush our teeth and bump my right hip toward him affectionately. We have grown up together by seeing each other truly, loving each other without sacfricing ourselves. We are each other's stories now. Despite this, I would be absolutely okay on my own without him, because I know how to love the world without losing myself for it. I know yearning is fleeting, and the satisfaction and joy that can be found in all aspects of life outside a marriage and not solely within it.

I have been okay with being alone since the train to Bath that day. We make our own circles. But I sure don't want to be without him yet.

This piece was in response to The Ink Well's creative non fiction prompt, 'Reflection'.