Unconscious coupling

Day 159 - Labuan Bajo

My hangover ensured an uneventful day in Labuan Bajo. Come the evening I'd arranged to meet the usual gang from the gangway and go for dinner down at the waterfront. There was an unexpected addition to the group, Jessie. She said hello, I made a joke about an oxygen tank and she laughed. I liked her immediately. She seemed to have a soft light about her that was a perfect shade of white in the same way I once saw a perfect shade of pink in Sydney. Huts selling fresh fish stood yards from the water's edge. You selected your preferred catch and took it to another hut where someone would grill it for you. We sat at long communal tables and, through some expert manoeuvring, I was opposite Jessie. Lest Thierry get any ideas I loudly reminded him of his success the previous night with Susie, the manager of the bar. Hey all's fair in love and war right? We talked about cats, we talked about babies, or was it cat babies? Doesn't matter, the sound of clicking drowned out the specifics. We return to the bar and orbit each other, not too close and never too far. Can you beat the moment when one of the subtle, friendly touches lingers and the other person doesn't move away? They let the hand stay and you both know it's there without a look or a word of acknowledgement. The physical hand, the intangible desire. All that time spent gazing, smiling, laughing, trying to gauge their disposition and provoke their interest is rolled up into a perfect ball of affirmation. Affirmation that you may well get that thing you fervently desire but also affirmation that you, too, can be the object of desire. I suspect that not everyone gets or needs the latter part but I do. It doesn't answer the vast need it once did though which is a marker of progress. Will it ever go away entirely? I'm not sure it will. Tonight everything feels wonderful though. After everyone else has turned in for the night we behave like shameless, louche Westerners and then regrettably retire to our different dorms. Even more regrettably I had a flight to Jakarta in the morning.
I had a flight to Jakarta this morning. I could just about make out the sound of it taking off without me. Looks like I'm staying then. It doesn't feel like the sensible thing to do, it feels like the only thing to do. I feared it might be seen as a bit full-on but she's pleased. If the first kiss was electrifying, unplanned, light as a feather then this one is tense, weighty and reassuring. I don't care about Jakarta, hell, I don't care about Indonesia. I don't care about budgets or forward movement. I care about this moment, extending it, soaking in its unfettered pleasure. The looks, the smiles, the laughs still come easily. To ask why risks holding a mirror to the whole thing, exposing it as just smoke. The question will come but for now the plans are frictionless. Bad planning on both our parts means we have to relocate to a private room in another hotel but we make the best of it. There's no real consideration of whether we will spend the coming days together, we just do. We go from strangers to, for practical purposes, a couple in no time at all. Is that the no-strings-attached ease of holiday romance? I'm not sure I have sufficient experience to answer that. Or is it the mark of something more? Don't ask that. Don't tie a ball and chain to this thing of light and air. I have to quietly laugh as I find myself venerating every facet and admiring every angle. Shells and torsos. The great pile of things that are a person never seemed so rich with jewels. The basest metal of a personality still shines so brightly in the dawn of a new relationship whatever its length or limitations. It's a fallacy but I indulge it anyway.

'Cause why not eh?

My internal dialog whirrs...

Why not enjoy the moment in its fullest?

Good point.

'Cause you're going to burn yourself again, fool.

I can already feel the slight gripping of my heart when I think a forward a few days and her departure from Labuan Bajo for the Komodo Tour. It is going to be a jagged edge that cuts through me. Like a plane window blowing out and all the oxygen being sucked from the space. I see myself again as that crushed plastic bottle sinking in the ocean, surrounded by the flotsam of unrealistic ambition. But isn't this also the best of life? Certainly I'd never felt a better version of me. These are the most intoxicating tastes and isn't this how love should be? But I must treat carefully on this fresh, scented ground and hope my steps don't get so heavy they trip a landmine. She is treading more softly still and I strain to hear her steps. Are they heading towards something like I feel mine are or just in ever-decreasing circles of time and pleasure? I spin through ever more metaphors. Now I perceive the tightrope on which Jessie and I walk. It's so broad that we're side-by-side, surefooted and unable to see the drop. It doesn't even bend under the weight because there is none. But I see how the tightrope will narrow until we're walking single-file again and the drop threatens every misstep. Threads will fall away, gravity will see to that. Can we take this rope and weave reality into it? Make it thick and strong enough to walk side-by-side again? The possibility seems fantastic. Maybe we have created a world within a world. Us against Labuan Bajo. A world that shatters when our common enemy is defeated. This could be a closed ecosystem that fatally unbalances when we let in the muddy light and corrupted air of the rest of the world. We spend gilded days room-hopping and spotting gorillas in the sunset at G-Spot. We take bike trips to deserted waterfalls and dirty beaches. She waxes lyrical about her love for Nutella and I am rapt. I don't think life has ever stopped quite the way it did the morning we lay and listened to Phoebe Bridgers. We do those things you do in nascent attraction like planning to open a hostel together. It is fun to toy with ideas of great seriousness and commitment both knowing that the only real barrier to such things is the willingness of both people to make that step. Why does the forming and feeling of a relationship like this so effectively displace my feelings for others. Liv? Haven't messaged her in days. Ollee? What a fuss over nothing. Sandra? Over that. It makes me feel guilty. Frivolous, inconsistent, unreliable and doubting in the strength of any of my feelings. I ask myself existential questions like whether I am capable of true love or whether a deep and permanent mangle-ment puts me outside humanity. A very special boy, just not in the way I always thought.
I find myself on a plane unused to the multiple hours we've now spent apart. Confused by her absence. Wondering where she is, what she's doing, what she's thinking (and is it of meeeee??) When will this plane land so I can check my messages? This is like a teenage infatuation, I can see that. Does anyone else still get this I wonder. In these moments my self-control evaporates and I picture us in each other's lives, around friends and family, going for drinks at our favourite pub. Silly, ludicrous, I know the ridiculousness of such ideas. This sort of wild and incautious romanticism is not cool these days. I should have been born in Jane Austen's time where people were in love in minutes, married within the hour (well supporting characters were anyway, Elizabeth, Emma, et al were harder work). But one thing I can say is that this is unmistakably real feeling again after a year in which hammer blows flattened my emotions like a schnitzel. These feelings are feverish, unfamiliar and pure. On the plane the faint whiff of chocolate is in the air. It might be Nutella, it might as well be. It could be a stroke, it would explain a lot.