Post-mortem

My ex surfaced in my mind today for the first time in a little while. The memories have lost their sharpness, and I can look back wistfully, without pain. Why I loved it was that it was so different to other relationships, other us's; swimming in the yarra at night, walking the streets of eltham at 2am, purposely losing ourselves in suburbia and then trying to find our way home, playing cards/scrabble and giving each other shit, in a satisfying, joke kind of way, walking the streets of the city, jumbled talking, visiting the sofitel toilets (best free view in melbourne), the road trip that brought us together, the hostel in byron bay where we first got together, with our fellow road-tripper asleep in the same room, the way that - even after the breakup - we could still catch up at uni on a hot day, talk, invade a sports-store and try bad clothes on, decide to go to brighton, ditching our other committments, walk along the beach for hours, finally find overpriced icecream and eat it watching the sun dwindling over the bay, talk of life and death on the boulders of the breakwater as night fell, devour noodles on the train home. I waited nearby while she broke it off with her new-boy-of-the-moment, and all was fine in the world.

And yet, the flaws. I didn't have the freedom to be boring; I couldn't allow myself to be self-critical, absent, irritating, or the us we'd (I'd?) built would dissolve. It was like an extension of the road trip, a journeying away while being here, centred in Melbourne, built around routine, uni, holidays, and in that respect, it was a continual process of wooing.

What I want is to be able to lie in bed for hours, sleepily nuzzling, a warm haze, with no need to move, to talk, to be of interest or not; to be like the pictures you see of animal couples sprawled in their nests, the warmth and nearness of the other providing everything, only chittering occasionally.