It’s an age thing or maturity or how, as time goes by, you might not be in Casablanca, but there are always those memories that come knocking on your mind of those women who mattered to you- those with whom you spent perhaps years and fell into a loving and secure routine of familiarity, but it’s always about the handful who made you feel alive and where there was so much living put into that time together.
These are those relationships that weren’t supposed to happen, but they did and which is probably why the attraction and love and connection were stronger than with other partners.
Over the years, I’ve seen marriages continue knowing that there was nothing there except perhaps having a child or children holding things together. And after this dance ran its course and the aging process came into play, these relationships can go every which way except back home.
There are perhaps four, or maybe two, no, three women who changed me forever- and pretty late in life.
One I married and fell into married life which, when looking back, maybe was or wasn’t for us. We were way too young to know feelings- real feelings- but it was right for the time.
Everything is about timing and those lockdown down years have changed many of us.
The girl I met before the hurdy gurdy man came along through a simple twist of fate, turned one night together in Colombo into a highly charged relationship where all barriers came down and we were happily lost and entwined in each other for as long as things were meant to last.
Whereas before, a vacation was checking into a five star hotel and ordering room service and watching television, she made me want to get off my arse and enjoy every aspect of travel- leaving the hotel room and hotel and embracing everything new around us.
This sense of adventure continued when we returned to Hong Kong. She had me leave the security of a service apartment and move to a walk-up she had somehow found in a very old and extremely local area of Hong Kong.
She loved living here and her enjoyment in finding tiny restaurants, going to the wet markets, getting to know the grassroots local community made me want to accompany her and enjoy a lifestyle I had never known before.
It was a freedom that made me look at life like a Joni Mitchell song- looking at life from both sides now.
Only now do I realise just how great those days were because of their honesty.
It was knowing when things were working and when Sinatra was starting to sing that the party was over.
When we broke up, I now see it as both sides making sure to detonate all bridges and that there would be a definite finality.
We had loved hard and it was everything we needed at the time and it was now time for a very radical change to keep our individual lives interesting.
We hadn’t tired of each other. We would always have what we had, but we needed to see what else was out there.
It was time.