I Would've Taken That To The Grave (2024)

TW: This memoir contains descriptions of sex, sexual assault, drug use, medical procedures, depression, and extreme amounts of lovergirl cringe.

A Note on Shame

I have been holding a lot of shame for the way things went over these six months of my life. I thought the decisions I made were moral failings and none of this would’ve happened if I didn’t let it happen, if I were a stronger person. I shamed myself for the mistakes I made, the behaviour I allowed, not being able to say no, not being able to move on. I used to think I could never let someone hurt me, never let someone take advantage of me twice, but I was so slowly lulled into the trauma bond that I couldn’t see it, and when I did, I couldn’t accept it. I told myself it all went this way because I didn’t trust myself, because I couldn’t make up my mind, because I was insecure. All the things that people were telling me about myself when I reached out for help.

Maybe those are reasons to keep everything that happened to myself, maybe it would save me more embarrassment. I wanted to leave Australia and finally live the life I planned for myself more than anything, and that clouded my judgement when it obviously wasn’t happening in Canada, but I don't want to feel shame for trying my best anymore. I went into all of this with an open heart, with a willingness to be proved wrong, with optimism and hope for the things I imagined. That doesn’t make me a bad person, or a weak person, it's only selfish people who would see that in me and seek to take advantage of it. Writing this memoir has brought me to a place where, although the heartbreak hasn’t subsided, I’m beginning to let go of the shame.

Bruises

When I returned to Australia after my 6 months in Canada, I had dinner with my friend Karita and opened up to her about everything I had been through. I also spoke to her about a death in my family that I found out about on my 20th birthday. I told her about how after his funeral I never showered, like is tradition in my culture, to wash bad spirits away. Since then there has been a grief that has stayed with me and I go through troubles around the time he passed every year. For my 21st birthday I went on exchange in Ireland and was sexually assaulted. I don’t remember much about the night it happened, it was unquestionably the drunkest I’d ever been, but I do remember kissing the 30 year old intern. When I got home the next day, in the mirror I saw bruises on my breasts, down my sides and felt the pain of bruising between my legs. I don’t know why but I still sometimes feel the ghost of the bruise left on the side of my chin. I came back to Australia and had a breakdown, almost failed out of university, and took a leave of absence from study. I tried to move in with my father but, even though he knew what happened to me, he chastised me so much for dropping my degree I had to leave. I packed my bags when he went away for work, left the keys in the mailbox, and drove 10 hours to live with my mother who didn’t know what happened and wouldn’t care to ask questions.

Then, just before the pandemic, my grandfather died. It’s confusing that one of the things I’m grateful for before lockdown was going to our village for the funeral. But through the grief of his passing, I was able to be with my whole extended family in our ancestral home before getting stuck in Melbourne for two years. Especially as my Uncle Alau and Aunty Gaire would also pass before the first year of Covid was done. Melbourne was miserable during lockdown, relationships suffered, and by its end I had cut contact with my father entirely. I experienced a lot of complicated emotional and verbal abuse from my mother growing up, so coming to see my father as someone I couldn’t trust was very isolating. After lockdown the only thing I could think about was getting the hell out of Melbourne again. I had been planning a trip to Europe with my friend Momina and a trip back to Ireland with my friend Dan, who I met on exchange in Ireland, and maybe I was a little broke but I needed to make it happen.

Ireland was difficult to plan as Dan and I were trying to organise a mini reunion with everyone else from our exchange, but the only person who semi-confirmed was Zach, who I’ll talk a lot more about in this memoir. So, Ireland didn’t happen but Europe with Momina briefly did, and Zach had told me he would meet me at the end of my trip in Barcelona anyway. I got all the way to Paris before I had issues with my vaccinations, and I gave up. I said goodbye to Momina at the train station to Italy to continue our two week vacation by herself and flew back to Australia after two nights. Leaving her there is one of the biggest regrets of my life, I was just defeated. I had struggled to save the money to go, we had planned everything we were going to do, and I was just heartbroken at the thought of spending the entire time not allowed to go anywhere, trying to convince people to let me stay in hotels ‘under-vaccinated’ (Australia had only provided their population with two doses when the rest of the world was already at three) when I could barely afford it. But I was only thinking of myself, I left her alone on her birthday, and I sometimes think what happened in Canada is my lot for leaving her in Paris. She’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever met, with the deepest, kindest hearts, and I count myself lucky every day that I’m still able to call her a friend.

Feeling like I lost Momina was the most difficult break up I’d ever been through. I spent a lot of time the rest of that year walking around the river near my home in the early hours of the morning thinking about the mistakes I made, thinking I knew if I was in that situation again I would’ve made the same decision, but it wasn’t worth it. I also thought a lot about how Zach was going to come all the way to Barcelona just to see me and I felt like I missed out on something there. He lived in New York, I lived in Melbourne, it felt too far apart, but I thought he really liked me and I started to like him too. Then to end a bad year even worse, in October my rental home and much of my belongings were destroyed when the Maribyrnong river flooded in Melbourne. I spent the last few months of the year living in an emergency centre on the outskirts of the city, basically homeless, and I truly thought it was the worst year of my life. I had been planning to move to the United States for a while, since I visited the UK after my assault and decided I didn’t like it, and I got into one of the best nursing degrees in the country to eventually apply for a working visa in the states. But as I was spending day after day alone in emergency housing I just thought fuck this, I can’t wait another 3 years to get out of here, and I paid a $700 deposit for a working holiday in Canada that summer.

By my 25th birthday, which I meditatively spent alone in an Airbnb, I decided I couldn’t keep wasting years of my life on healing and planning and taking things slow. I’d never felt shallow enough to care about ageing, but being 25, living with my father again after the flood and watching my brother move to New Zealand to live with a girl he met online around the same time Zach reached out to me again, I thought maybe I am running out of time. However, nothing is as easy as packing up your things and leaving, and before I could leave, I had to tie a million loose ends. After my brother noticed a bump on her belly button, my mother had found out she not only had a hernia, but a 15 inch diameter mass growing in her abdomen for the last 20 years. The mass had fused to her intestines, wrapped around her kidney, and doctors were pretty sure it was cancerous. So, I became her part time carer and, around working full time, took her to months worth of hospital appointments and operations. It was such a long process I had to ask the working holiday company to push back my employment in Canada from the summer to the winter and stretched the entry window for my working visa out as far as I could. I saw my mother through a surgery to try and save her kidney (which failed), a 12 hour surgery to remove the mass in her abdomen (thank god the biopsy came back with no cancerous cells found), another unexpected surgery because they injured her spleen in theatre, her months in hospital and living with me while she recovered. At the end I decided if there were things left unfinished, like my mother's other medical issues and the reversal of her ileostomy, it wasn’t my responsibility. My brothers could take care of it, I was leaving Australia.

The thing I was the most excited for when I was about to leave, was going to New York on the way and seeing Zach again in person. I’d had a crush on Zach at the start of our exchange, but I never felt like he was interested in me, so I didn’t really give it a second thought. There was one weekend where I was going to Galway and I offered to let him share my hostel room (wink wink, nudge nudge), but he never came. Then during the pandemic, when I thought we were both locked away on other sides of the world, he started reaching out to me again. He told me how much he regretted not coming to Galway with me and I said I guess we’ll never know what could've happened. He didn’t agree with that, he said we would see each other again somewhere in the world. From that point on we talked all the time, for years actually. We talked about music, how much we both loved The Smiths and The Cure, movies and television, he put me onto Fleabag and we’d laugh about how much we both loved Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. For three years we were kind of just talking, sexting, sending each other explicit pictures and videos, planning the things we’d say and do when we saw each other again. When Ireland and Spain didn’t work out, we talked about going to the Middle East together, he said he really wanted to go to Damascus. When we’d talk about my culture, he’d say he wanted to come to Australia or the Pacific, and for a while we talked about going to Fiji together. Ireland was still in the conversation too and going back to Galway, I would always tell him how I imagined myself one day living there in a cottage by the sea.

Back home I confided with my friends about how confusing it felt that none of the things we talked about ever happened, he never called me to talk on the phone, sometimes he felt hot and cold. But we lived on other sides of the world so it made sense to me that those kinds of things wouldn’t always line up. After the pandemic even Momina and I rarely found the time to talk on the phone or facetime, and we would zoom practically every single day in lockdown. So, I let it be whatever it was and whenever it felt like there was no point in doing what I was doing with Zach, or I felt like I wanted to date more in Melbourne, I would hit him up to cut things off. That eventually turned into a cycle, every few months I would say this isn’t going anywhere let’s leave it, he would agree, and things would cool off. Then he would hit me up again and we’d continue as if nothing changed, and I didn’t mind him doing that, I was never seeing anyone seriously anyway and I really liked him.

Then the year or so leading up to Canada it was different. We were hotter than ever (as hot as you can be through text I guess). He’d asked me what part of Canada I was living in so he could “come link me”. I told him I’d be living in shared room staff housing, so maybe that wouldn’t be so fun to visit. I said I’ve always wanted to go to New York so maybe I could stop there on the way instead. He sent me a GIF of Jasmine and Aladdin, he was going to show me the world, and told me he’d be my tour guide and lover. For a while we talked about me going to see him on Halloween and getting matching Spiderman costumes because of the Spiderman couple memes we would often send to each other in that time when the movies were really popular. It was just hard to set things in stone because the job I had in Canada hadn’t given me a start date yet. He would ask me when I was coming, check in to see if I had bought my plane tickets yet, tell me to hurry up. I let him know when I had bought them and I asked him if he could be my US contact on my travel visa application. He said yes. He asked me if I could stay with him instead of staying at a hotel. I said yes. I asked him if I bought tickets to a concert the next February, would he want to come with me. He said yes, we would make it our late Valentine's Day. We said we were lovers, we called each other baby, he called me love, I told him I missed him, he told me he yearned for me. He told me he didn’t want to be with anyone else until he was with me. I promised him I wouldn’t let anyone else touch me until we were together. In September before I left, I sent him videos I had made for him for his birthday. He told me he thought he loved me. I told him I never wanted anyone as much as I wanted him. We planned to go to a sex store together, we said we wanted to only have sex without protection, we wanted to film it so we’d always have something to watch when we were apart. We promised we wouldn’t stream the last episode of Attack of Titan until we were together.

Where U Are

Quitting my job, saying goodbye to my friends and family, paying for where I was staying and what I was doing on the way to Whistler, Canada was stressful, but exciting. I packed my things, took my dog to live with my Mum (leaving a hundred kisses on the warm spot on the top of her nose) and flew with two years’ worth of luggage to stay with my brother in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Kobe picked me up at the airport in Wellington and I was in for a cute little two week holiday. A week sightseeing and a week house sitting while he went on a cruise with his girlfriend and her family. The first few days were perfect. Aotearoa is so beautiful, the land is so green, the water is so blue, and the sky is filled with low white clouds. It’s no mystery why our Māori brothers and sisters called it the land of the long white cloud. My mother once told me a story about the first time my grandmother, my bubu lady, came to Australia from Papua New Guinea and remarked how dark and evil the beaches looked. In her village the sand is soft and white, and the sea is gentle and blue and clear. I wondered what she would think of Aotearoa’s skyline meeting its blue oceans, I don’t think she would call it evil water.

My brother took me all around Porirua and we had the “best pies in Wellington” just down from his house. I watched Eagle vs. Shark, directed by Taika Waititi, and immediately drove around the neighbourhood to see the Marae, the playground, and the shops where he shot scenes from the movie. I made my brother take me to the park out of town where they shot scenes for Rivendell in Lord of the Rings, and all the shooting locations I could find online around Wellington and Mount Victoria. We went looking for Peter Jackson’s house (unsuccessfully) and did a little shopping at Weta workshop where they created props for the movies. There I bought two fridge magnets in the shape of Elven leaves, the same that the fellowship wear on their cloaks in the movies, for Zach and Dan, who I was also staying with on the way to Whistler, because I knew they were both huge Lord of the Rings fans too.

Because New York was my next stop I was trying to get Zach on the phone as soon as I got into Aotearoa. I asked him if we could talk for a minute, I really needed to check in before I got to his place in the Bronx, and he said yeah let’s talk tomorrow. I waited but I didn’t hear from him so I hit him up again, like hey, can we talk? Again, he said yeah sure, let’s talk tomorrow. I had been really nervous for quite a while because there was a time before I bought my plane tickets that I had asked what he expected things between us to be like when we were together. He said he would be my lover and tour guide, friends with benefits. I wasn’t happy with that, I told him “lovers” meant something different to me and I want something more intimate in life, I thought it was maybe best we didn’t do this. He had gotten immediately upset with me, he said how do I know he doesn't want something intimate? Maybe he just didn’t want to get attached to me when I was on the other side of the world. He told me I should hit “him up when I change my mind”. It was a douchey thing to say, and I should've taken it as a red flag, but I thought I had over complicated things and tried to work it out because we both still wanted each other. Only after that conversation, and mutually agreeing to just see what it was in person, did we become more affectionate. By the time I bought plane tickets I thought we were both really into it, but he could still be hot and cold while I was stressing out. I needed to check in with him seriously, then he blew me off for six days. I was supposed to be staying at his in a week, spending every day with him, sleeping in his bed, having unprotected sex, and he wouldn’t find time for one conversation with me. For six days. It wasn’t okay.

When he finally called, I panicked. One moment I was begging him to talk to me and the next I was staring at his Instagram handle lighting up my phone as it rang out. I told him I just wanted to talk over text because I wasn’t sure I could get out what I wanted to say. Maybe I was overly sensitive, but I’m not a non-confrontational person, and I wanted to address the uneasy feelings that had been coming up for me for a while. I didn’t trust that he had been celibate the whole time he said he was waiting, and whatever I didn’t really care if he wasn’t, but I didn’t want to be blindsided by something I didn’t know or feel like I was supposed to be a secret while I was staying with him. I asked him upfront if he was seeing other people. He said he had slept with someone last month, but no, he wasn’t seeing anyone seriously. I asked him why he didn’t tell me. He said it was none of my business. I tried to tell him it was my business because we told each other we’d wait, and we told each other we wouldn’t use protection. He said he guessed that was fair, and he’d still like to hang out as friends while I was in the city, but I can’t stay with him anymore. I was extremely upset, I sent him a voice note where I realised too late he would be able to hear my voice shaking, and asked him why he was changing his mind. He dismissed me immediately, like he was actually angry with me for being upset, because to him “it wasn’t that deep”. He said he thought I was just going to New York anyway and everything we had been saying to each other was “mostly bullshit”.

Obviously, I can’t remember any of our conversations word for word, but that “mostly bullshit” still rings in my mind today. I said to him, you’re saying this was bullshit but when I kept asking if everything was okay, for months, you told me I was just being insecure? He told me I was insecure. I said maybe I am, but that's not what you were saying, I was checking in and you said I was being insecure about us. He told me “there is no us”, “because we’re not together you know that right?”. He asked me what I thought we were? Friends with benefits in different countries? Lovers from afar? He made sure I knew that he wasn’t “in love” with me. I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say and I asked him, but didn’t we plan this trip together? He said, I don't know what you want me to say, but you can still cancel your flights to New York.

I didn’t know how to react, it hurt but it also felt so ridiculous. What did love to have to do with it? We’d already talked it all out and agreed to see what it was in person. We’d been saying how much we wanted each other for three years, now he was telling me we’d both never meant any of it? How could he just flippantly say I could cancel my flights to New York, I literally couldn’t, since when were any international flights refundable without insane fees. He knew I was flying from New Zealand to New York to Chicago, what was I supposed to do. I was on the way to live in Canada, I’d already started the trip, I couldn’t cancel anything. I told him he was an asshole but another part of me, the part that I thought was weak and my psychologist tells me is why I’m a good person, thought maybe there was something else going on with him. I took what I was offered, I told him that the situation was shit, but it’s fine and of course I still want to hang out as friends. Whatever it was, we could figure it out in person, and barring that I thought we could still catch up and have a good time.

My brother, his girlfriend, and her family went on their cruise the next day and I was left in the house alone. Porirua is beautiful but Kobe suggested I didn’t go outside because it’s known as a hub for the Mongrel Mob. They also left me their car to get around, but in true Islander fashion it belonged to another member of her family, was unregistered and had a shitty battery that you had to jump literally every time you needed to start it. I took it to the shopping centre once to get my nails done before New York, but I wasn’t going to risk breaking down or getting pulled over, so I just stayed in the house. I binge ate through my depression about this situation with Zach, played Jedi survivor and the Spider-Man video game, and cried. I was completely alone, I had nothing and no one to distract me from the things I was thinking about, and I drove myself into a spiral. I thought about all the time I’d wasted, all the people in Melbourne who I didn’t give a chance or didn’t take seriously, because in the back of my mind I thought about Zach. I thought about how many pictures and videos I had sent him of every part of my naked body and how that felt so humiliating now. I thought about how the first time he asked for pictures of my vagina, when I sent it, he said it made him hard on the subway. I thought about how disgusted I was at myself that I ignored he could be such a thoughtless idiot. I thought about how he made me think we had so much in common, how long I thought we had both been imagining us together, how it was all suddenly “bullshit”.

The spirals turned into blame. I had spent so much money on flights, prompted in part by his question about whether I had got them yet. Except, he never explicitly asked “Halle can you buy plane tickets to see me?”. So, wasn’t this all my fault? But how could he dismiss all the plans we made a week out? How could he make all those promises to me if everything was bullshit? We planned it together, it wasn’t just me. The reality of his thoughtlessness broke through and I wrote a lengthy message detailing all the ways I felt he manipulated me to this point, just to turn his back on me. I also told him how disgusted I was that he was planning to have unprotected sex with me without telling me how recently he’s had other partners. I sent the message, blocked him, and cried. I had been dreaming of going to New York since high school, every year since I was fourteen I would make my friends look at all the Met Gala Dresses on my laptop, imagining the day I’d finally go in May to see the costume institute exhibition. But I had planned to go to New York in November and February with Zach. Yes, I was going to New York in November because it worked with my job contract in Canada, but we also planned it together. I was going to New York in February to see a Mitski concert, but we also planned it together. Now, I was going to New York by myself, with nowhere to stay and nothing to do, because even though he knew it was nothing for him, he fed me lies until it was too late for me. I thought we were doing this together, now we weren’t.

Dan was Zach’s homestay brother in Ireland and when I told him what happened he offered to ask friends in the city if I could stay at theirs. It was really considerate of him and I said thanks but I could work it out, I’m not super comfortable sleeping at strangers houses. In New York the only thing I could afford, that wasn’t a late stage capitalism sleeping pod, was a hotel on the Bronx side of the Harlem river anyway, so I booked it. I also got a seat at a Broadway show, because it was the only thing I could think of to do in the short time I suddenly had to plan a weekend trip in the big city. Zach had been telling me for years he would show me around New York, he told me we were going to go to the botanical gardens in the Bronx, and we had to see the Cloisters. I told him he’d have to follow me around to all the museums I wanted to go to, and he told me he wouldn’t be following me, he'd be right there beside me. He’s a real New Yorker, I thought he would show me the real city. He’s a bartender, I thought he would take me out to some cool places at night. I was just so confused, so deep in denial that things were really as bad as they were, and just as reality had broken through when I blocked him, it slipped away again.

Maybe he didn’t manipulate me, maybe I did just misinterpret everything. Maybe I should’ve known all along the plans we made weren’t supposed to be serious. Forget about him telling me he would come to Canada first and asking me if I had booked my flights to New York and asking me to stay with him and taking work off that weekend to spend it with me and telling me we’d do it all again in February for Mitski. Maybe everything I think he did wrong I came up with in my head, like he implied. Maybe I did this because I’m delusional and in love with him, like he implied. No, no, no, I’m not delusional, but he’s right about everything else and I took things too far. As I was on the long silent stretch flying across the Pacific Ocean, eerily lacking any noise from turbulence or the other passengers, I bought the in-flight Wi-Fi to unblock Zach and send another message. I said, I know I sent you those big paragraphs, but would you still hang out with me while I’m in New York anyway? He said of course he would, he would spend all his free time with me. He also said maybe he’s drunk, but he still really wanted me, though he deleted that before I could reply. When I got to the arrivals at JFK I glanced around the airport, just in case, to see if he was there waiting for me. He wasn’t.

Will I See You Again?

So, I was in New York city. The initial disappointment of the airport wasn’t too bad a blow. I told Zach not to meet me there anyway so what did I expect? I got an overpriced sim at a sketchy one man booth at JFK, because I never considered how I’d get where I needed to go without someone picking me up, and I headed for my hotel. The big red ‘Welcome to the Bronx” sign greeted me on the highway, I had a little chat with the girl who checked me in because she had never met an Australian before, dropped my heavy bags off and I caught the subway to Manhattan. It was around eight o’clock and the night was young, but I was a little nervous about being out in the city alone, so I messaged Zach to say, “hey I’m downtown if you want to come hang out with me”. He said he was sorry, but he had gone out the night before and was still too hungover to go anywhere. Now he could be a functioning alcoholic who drank himself into a coma, but eight in the evening the next night rang as a fake excuse. If a friend I hadn’t seen in 5 years turned up in Melbourne, I would be running to the CBD to find them. In fact I had done exactly that when my friend Koteka had come to Melbourne just a few months before. Threw my shoes on, told the uber to drive mad into the city, and crashed dinner at a restaurant half-way through because she had mentioned they were headed to Carlton. Zach wasn’t doing that for me, so I walked around alone. I saw Radio City Music Hall, the Rockefeller Centre, Time Square, Madison avenue, Grand Central Station, the Empire State Building (from a distance) and I ended my night window shopping and watching families ice skate at the Christmas Market in Bryant Park. It was lonely, and I didn’t quite know where to go so I had my face buried in google maps most of the time, but I loved New York City right away.

The next day I woke up in my hotel in the Bronx, no messages, and headed back downtown to find something to do. I got off the subway at the Met but it wasn’t open yet, so I went for a walk in Central Park while I waited to go inside. When the museum opened I went straight to the American history section to look at the Indigenous art, my own way of paying respect to the traditional owners without having any community contacts in this new place. I spent the day looking at Egyptian artefacts, Asian statues, and European paintings. Some works I hated, especially anything by Paul Gaugin, and some I loved, particularly the old soviet communist party prints. Morning turned into mid-day, mid-day turned into mid-afternoon, and I still hadn’t heard from Zach. I sat down in a mostly empty corner of the museum and called my Dad for a chat. When I was having low moments in North America, like I was then, and I realised I didn’t really have anyone on that side of the world who I knew and trusted, I would call my Dad. The broken trust hadn’t truly mended over the years, so much as blown over like most things do in my family, but I knew even if it was just to say I’m too busy right now my Dad would always pick up the phone for me. I lamented about everything being stolen at the Met, but I also told him how I found it more tolerable than the British Museum. The latter had felt so colonial and cold when I visited years ago that it actually gave me a panic attack.

It was near two in the afternoon when Zach eventually messaged me. He said he was going to a thrift store in Brooklyn with friends, then he was heading to one of his boy's bars out there. I was welcome to join, or tomorrow we could go to Bryant Park for the Christmas Market, but he also has a birthday thing in the evening, though I could come to that too if I wanted. I was immediately upset, maybe unreasonably so, but to me not a word of that was an actual invitation. Except for Bryant Park and I had already spent my first night there alone. I had spent a thousand dollars on flights, crossed two countries and the Pacific Ocean to be here, and he wasn’t interested in where I was or what I was doing or how I would get to Brooklyn when I didn’t know my way around. I was pissed. I told him I spent last night in Bryant Park, and I started an argument immediately.I asked him why he told me on the plane he would spend the whole time with me if he had all these other plans. He said it wasn’t his fault he made plans after I sent him the “shit” I said in my messages, and he was inviting me to come anyway. I told him I guessed that was fair, but I felt silly being so easily replaced. He could see his friends any time he wanted, and I was only here for three days. He said he could meet me at a cafe in Harlem instead but I said no, I didn’t just want to sit at a cafe and politely talk about this stupid situation, I was there to have fun. He told me to meet him at a bar but I wasn’t sure about that either. He tried to say fine, let's not see each other at all, but I stopped him and agreed to go to have drinks. There was a place called McSorley's in the East Village and Zach said he would meet me there around two the next day.

I look back on this situation now and think how I acted was unfair, thrifting is a great activity, and I really wanted to go to Brooklyn. I could've met him there or at that bar with his friends and just caught up casually, but I’m really glad I didn’t. I felt then, even though I was telling myself I couldn’t believe it, this guy just kept lying to me and gaslighting me for expecting him to follow through with plans he made. I didn't want to embarrass myself, being paraded around in front of ‘his boys’, after being treated the way I was. Knowing everything I knew by the end of everything, I’m grateful I overreacted. However, at the time I was so upset at him, and myself, that afternoon I gave up on sightseeing and wasted my time in New York by going all the way back to my hotel in the Bronx to cry. However, something lit up in me in the middle of my quiet tears. How could I be wasting even a little bit of time in this city, my dream city. I thought okay, what is something I’ve always wanted to do in America that I can do right now… see an NBA game? Fuck it, let’s get it. I picked up my phone, bought tickets to the Knicks vs. the Hornets, and was out the door in ten minutes. I ran directly to the subway, I didn't even cross the street when the sidewalk ended and marched through litter, broken glass and weeds, to get there in an uninterrupted bee line. I changed lines to get as close to the stadium as I could, admittedly getting turned around a few times because I didn’t know my way around the subways (even with google maps I have a horrible sense of direction), and I ran through the doors of Madison Square Garden. I got to my section late, and because the game had already started, they wouldn’t let me find my seat, so I missed the first quarter. But I was there, I was at an NBA game. Every single person in my basketball obsessed family had been dreaming about this their entire lives and I was the first one to do it. I took pictures of the Garden for my family and ended the day with plans for a better tomorrow.

I didn’t really know my way around the East village, just like my whole trip to New York, but on google maps it seemed like it would be easy to find something to do. I took the subway down in the morning, got to Bowery street and saw that nothing was open yet, so I went for another walk. I happened to pass by Katz Delicatessen and went in to order a late morning Reuben. I embarrassed myself a little because they have a certain way they do things and I had no idea how to order, but the fine Puerto Rican behind the counter said “let me help you out mami”, made me a sandwich, grabbed me a Pepsi and pulled my seat out before I ate. Let me tell you, the sandwich was delicious but my god it was way too big. It felt like such a waste because I couldn’t even finish half the thing before I packed up my stuff, paid at the door, and left. I headed to the Brooklyn Bridge with a full belly and lord knows I tried my very best to get on that damn bridge. I wanted to find the spot where Abby and Ilana wrote their names in the last episode of Broad City, but I just couldn’t do it. The only two things about me that will never change is that I love dogs and I’m afraid of heights. Maybe I would've gone a little way further if I had someone to encourage me along, but I gave it my best effort then my palm started sweating, my legs started shaking, half the Reuben in my stomach felt too heavy and I turned tail. I headed to the bowery to look around a bit more, was too nervous to go into the smoke shops to buy legal weed for the first time, and decided to head to McSorley’s early. It was about one in the afternoon, an hour drinking alone in an old bar didn't seem like such a bad idea, especially for an Irish gal like me.

At McSorley's the only thing on tap is a light beer and a dark beer so I got two dark beers and sat in a booth in the back corner to call my Dad. It was actually quite nice, old Irish pub vibes with memorabilia on the walls like newspaper clippings and black and white photos, lights strung around the roof for Christmas. There were regulars there making loud conversation with the bartender, or was it the owner, and his son. When it was getting closer to two in the afternoon Zach messaged me to say sorry, he wouldn’t get there until three. I waited. Three in the afternoon came and Zach messaged me again to say sorry he wouldn’t get there until four. I waited. Then I paid my bill, leaving a big tip for taking up their booth for so long and not eating or drinking much, and headed back to my hotel. I was on the subway when four around came and Zach said he was sorry but his sister needed help with something, and he had that birthday thing he mentioned later, so he wasn’t going to make it. There was no explanation of what his sister needed, no half-hearted invitation for me to come along to the birthday thing this time, he had stood me up. I flew to New York to see this guy because I thought we’d had feelings for each other for three years, I thought we had been friends for five years, and he wouldn’t spend twenty minutes on a train to come downtown to see me. I felt so worthless and humiliated, on a level I’d never felt before and I imagine I’ll never feel again. I never got to give him his stupid Lord of the Rings fridge magnet. We had words, I called him an asshole, he said he felt like a piece of shit. I went back to my hotel in the Bronx again to cry. I cried for so long, I skipped dinner. I cried so loud in the long quiet night that my neighbour in the next room got the front desk to kindly ask me to stop. I turned on the shower, laid on the floor, and cried muffled tears under the hot rushing water til morning.

The next day I tried, I really tried, to make the most of my last day in my dream city. I got up, I got a bacon egg and cheese, I walked the whole length of Central Park from Harlem to Midtown. I made stops at The Dakota, where they shot John Lennon. I took pictures of the crazy high skyscrapers on billionaire's row. I didn’t even think to find the Bethesda fountain, which was unfortunate, and I headed back to time square. I got a New York slice at whatever pizza spot that was nearby and New York cheesecake at some place with a line out the door. I took pictures of the Christmas trees at Rockefeller Centre and found a post office to send a postcard to Momina, as I had been doing in every city I travelled through. The ladies at the post office were slow and distracted but I cut into their conversation and had a laugh with the Aunty complaining about wanting to retire. Maybe New Yorkers are boisterous, but I liked how it felt compared to Melbourne and Sydney and London. I liked that they constantly strike up conversation with each other, even if it was to argue half the time. As I was leaving the post office I passed three guys, one of whom I’m assuming was Italian American, and I caught a bit of their conversation which went as follows:
“You know she's never farted in front of him, 43 years they’ve been married, and she's never farted in front of him. There was only one time when he smelt it, because she farted and then he walked in the room, that was it!”
Now I don’t want to say that was that situation the charmed me specifically, but it was too perfectly ridiculous. As painful as my experience was in New York, I loved that city.

The crowd was actually bumping for Hadestown, the Broadway show I had bought a ticket to when Zach first told me he was bullshitting me. It was Jordan Fisher’s opening week in the role of Orpheus and all the Broadway and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before fangirls were screaming every time he came on stage. My ancient Greek themed cocktail might have cost $30 ($60 AUD!!!) but I really enjoyed myself too. After the show I waited around Time Square for midnight. As soon as it hit December first, I took a picture of my Morning Star flag, given to me by my Melanesian sisters Cyndi and Yas, in front of One Time Square for the annual West Papuan global flag raising and called it a night.

Miles

At some point in the months of preparation, the stress of travelling and the heartache of being in New York, I lost myself. Maybe it was a gradual thing, maybe the damn broke the night I spent crying in my hotel, I’m not sure. I just know by the time I got to Chicago I was kind of joyless. I couldn’t think about anything except the years of Zach's lies and manipulations for a minute to enjoy where I was. The only thing I could do was lash out at him on Instagram. I thought okay, as soon as I leave New York I’ll never speak to him again, but I couldn’t stop myself. Okay, as soon as I get off the plane in Chicago, I’ll never speak to him again, but I couldn’t stop myself. Okay, as soon as I get to Dan’s I’ll never speak to him again, but I couldn’t stop myself. When I told Dan what happened he asked me if I blocked him, and technically I wasn't lying when I said I did, but I just couldn’t stop unblocking him to kick off again. I thought it was wrong, I’d never gone off on someone like this, but it was the only place I could direct the anguish I was feeling.

I wasn’t only telling Zach he was a piece of shit and a coward and a liar and whatever horrible thing I felt justified saying that I don’t remember. I was begging him to tell me, how could he do this to me? How could he waste my time like this? How could he lie to me like he did? What was the point of everything we said, everything we planned, for all those years if he never wanted to see me? He said there was no reason, he said he was just talking to me because I was hot, he said he just got caught up calling me baby and saying he yearned for me. I told him that was bullshit, you can’t get “caught up” for three years, tell me the real reason? He said there was no reason, some things just don't have a reason. I still wouldn’t let up, so he blocked me, but I chased him on another app and made him follow me again. There was just no way that was the truth. I left things open for us to see each other when I was going to New York in February because there was no way that was the truth. I still wanted the experience that we had been talking about for three years, I don't know why I couldn’t let it go even after he’d done something so horrible to me. I was hoping we had both just made mistakes. I was stupid.

Dan and his girlfriend Tati were so nice to me in Chicago, and I think I made for such an uncomfortable house guest. I stayed at their place for free, they didn’t even let me pay for dinner, and all I gave them in return was a Lord of the Rings fridge magnet (though I don’t know, I thought it was a pretty cool gift). They smoked me out, took me out to dinner twice, got me my first po’boy and deep dish Chicago pizza. They kept me company playing Mario Kart and Mario Party, which I was terrible at on the Wii except for a mini game where you had to basically jerk off the controller, I won that every time. We went to Chicago’s Christmas market for German hot chocolates and the 2024 mugs. My first North American hot chocolate was delicious, but Americans have a sweet tooth I don’t think many Australians could comprehend. We looked at glass ornaments and handmade Christmas decorations, all a bit too fragile for me to feel comfortable shoving them somewhere in my tightly packed luggage. It was exactly the American Christmas vibes I idolised growing up in Australia, consuming too much American media, but something about the market made me sad. Maybe I was thinking I made a mistake with Zach, maybe I should have just gone to Bryant Park a second time. If we had just had a friendly catch up there, or in Brooklyn, wouldn’t I feel better? If I didn’t react so badly, wouldn’t I feel better?

I left Dan and Tati and went for a walk around downtown Chicago. I didn’t feel great about disappearing suddenly, but I think they were happy to give me time on my own to sightsee, and I was on the verge of tears again anyway. I went to Macy’s for some reason and called my Dad again while I was walking around the store and I braved the cold to walk along the river most of the day. I headed to The Bean (which was closed off for maintenance) and finished my hours-long walk staring out into the great expanse of Lake Michigan. I didn’t Uber back to Dan’s till the sun went down, just took the time to be on my own. I think it was exactly what I needed after New York. Someone to talk to, a comfortable home, a familiar face, while I was feeling so lonely and hurt and disappointed on the other side of the world. Whatever happened in New York I was going to dish with Dan anyway because he was Zach's homestay brother in Ireland. Maybe that dish ended up being a little angrier than the saucy gossip like I was expecting to share. Nevertheless, it was nice to talk about it with the only other person in my life who knew him. Dan became such a trusted person to me through everything I went through in Canada, a real friend to lean on, and I’m really grateful we got to reconnect.

So, I went to Vancouver with a renewed determination to make the best of things. I spent my days there walking around the city, like I do in every new place, and had my first poutine at the Fatburger next to my hostel. Vancouver had posters of Christine Sinclair everywhere, the world’s all-time leading goal scorer in Women's soccer, and I had really gotten into soccer since Australia hosted the women’s World Cup so I decided to go to her final game against the Matildas. It was perfect, the US were hosting the men’s World Cup in 2026 and I had been planning to see a game there anyway, so I already had my soccer Australia scarf and my Mary Fowler jersey. Our Tillies lost but it felt fitting for Sinclair’s final international match, and it was great to see BC place packed out for women’s soccer. Everything else I got up to in Vancouver was very adminy, just stuff for when I started work. I had to get a Social Security number, open a Canadian bank account and buy winter clothes for living in Whistler. It was less of a sightseeing holiday at that point and more about getting settled into life in a new country. However, I did manage to make time for a social night with other people who were starting their work contract with me. Everyone was a few years younger, and almost all were white Australians on working holidays which made me feel a little out of place, but I met a Māori girl named Claudia who was also 25. We stuck together for a while, spent the rest of our time in Vancouver with each other, and went halves of crazy amounts of weed for when we left the city.

Alone Again

Claudia and I drifted apart more and more after New Years, she got closer with her friends in the restaurant, and I started keeping to myself working in housekeeping. I didn’t get a lot of time off work, but I had the $1600 bonus (which turned out to only be $1200 after the hotel paid it out on my paycheck and it was taxed, another way they scammed us) so I thought I better use it. As our schedules were all over the place to provide support during the Christmas season, I didn’t want to wait for anyone to come with me, didn’t try to line up some schedules or swap shifts so I wouldn’t be alone. As soon as I had three days off in a row, I hired a car and drove straight for the US border, leaving snowy Whistler behind for rainy Seattle. I used my staff discounts to stay at another five star hotel, the Fairmont Olympic, I had the room to myself, and I could use whatever facilities I wanted. Because I was Fairmont staff, the hotel also upgraded my room to a king suite and really took care of me. That’s the only thing I miss about working at the Fairmont, discounts, upgrades and staff perks wherever I went. I bought Sleepless in Seattle on my dad’s Amazon prime account, which I didn’t realise was hardly set in Seattle at all, got some chowder from room service for dinner, and settled in for my first night away. The next day, I didn’t pick up my car from the concierge, I just walked all over the city. I spent most of the day at the Museum of Pop Culture, saw the sky needle, the harbour and browsed all the stores at Pike Place Market. I ended my night by going to Target to buy clothes, because there was pretty much nowhere to buy socks or underwear in Whistler.

Since being in New York, and crying over Zach, I had gone on one date with an Eritrean guy called Adam who was visiting Whistler for the weekend before Christmas. He was also form Seattle, he took me out for lunch and drinks later that night. He was nice enough, but a little boring, and it was unfortunate that he was also sharing a room with people he worked with. We had to wait until Sasha left for her morning shift to do anything together. For a moment I thought about inviting someone over for the night in Seattle, but Adam was disappointing in bed, I mean I genuinely think he might’ve been a virgin, and I was over being disappointed. I just watched the Goonies instead, and Twilight, any movie I felt nostalgic about that was set in the Washington. The last day I didn’t even go out into the city, I knew I would be going back to work and my shared room again, so I spent the day in my hotel suite alone.

January was much the same as December. I woke up in the morning, I put on my cleaning uniform, I spent the day cleaning rooms or vacuuming hallways or doing laundry. Sometimes I would walk into a guest room and it would already be done so I would just sit on the couch for half an hour. Most of the time I was just trying to finish as quickly as possible so I could clock out early and go back upstairs. If Sasha wasn’t around I’d sit in bed and if she was I would go to the gym in the village. I think I was well liked when I first started in housekeeping and i was making an attempt to get to know people, but by January I stopped, I stopped hanging out with Claudia and I stopped speaking to my roommate. I was the same horrible company I was in Chicago. There was just not a single moment where I was totally alone, even in the shower I’d think I couldn't spend forever in there because a housekeeper could burst in at any moment, which they sometimes did. It was like always being at work, I mean I was literally living where I worked, and it made me never want to talk to anyone in the hotel at all. I really liked my roommate Sasha, but I was quiet and cold and we had to be around each other too much for my liking. I think that’s why she eventually moved rooms, or because I snored too loudly.

One afternoon I went to the gym and, because she had been waiting for a new room for a few days, I didn’t know if she would still be in there by the time I came back. I was really lucky she wasn’t because as I was walking back down the hall of the hotel, I got a call from my mum to say that my dog had died. My dog was my soulmate in animal form, she was supposed to be a gift for my brother when we were kids but when I picked her up out of her litter, she fell asleep in my arms. Everyone knew she was my girl from day one. I took her with me when I ran away from home when I was fifteen and apart from this time in Canada the longest she and I had ever spent apart was the month I was in Ireland. I had her for seventeen years, since I was nine years old, I barely remember life without her, she meant everything to me. My Mum had been telling me how sick she had been, and I had been telling her to take her to the vet for weeks. However much it was going to cost I would’ve paid for it. At this point in Whistler, I knew I wasn’t living the life I had planned and I wouldn’t be there for much longer. I had thought to myself, I understand she’s sick and I understand she’s old and I made peace with the fact that she would probably pass while I was away. But that was when I thought I was leaving forever, when I thought I was seeking this new life I imagined, new connections in a new place. The fantasy I had in my mind about leaving Australia as long as I could remember was not this life. I had to stay at this job until the first of May to pay off my bonus. I had to go to the Met in May like I always planned. But it’s just a few months, Holly can wait for me, and then I’ll come back for her.

My mum told me she was in the front garden next to the flowers when she died. She barked three times, laid down and then her chest stopped rising and falling. It was too painful, realising I was existing in the world without this creature I had shared my whole life with. It was too painful thinking about how she didn’t die comfortably, how I wasn’t with her. Why was I there, in Whistler, in Canada, wasting my time and money for this horrible experience, to let my girl die alone. I couldn’t find my room key, fumbling in my bag on the ground in front of my door, openly crying in the hallway when one of the chefs who was also living in the hotel stopped to ask if I was okay. I told Louis I was fine, but my dog had just died. He hugged me, which was unexpected but soothing, and told me everything would be okay. He showed me a poem about a rainbow bridge where dogs would be waiting for you when you die. Something he read when his dog died recently, it was really sweet and comforting. I walked into my room, no Sasha, threw myself on the bed and cried. When I look at my face in a mirror now, the lines on my forehead that weren’t there before remind me of the pain of losing my girl. More than even the tattoo on my arm for her, or her ashes next to my bed. Sad and alone, alone without her, I felt like I cried so much my face was frozen in its shape.

I took the next day off work after that, I guess to the hotel she was only a dog but people could tell that I was really distraught over it. If you took the day off, for someone like me who was always early and a pretty good worker, they didn’t really ask a lot of questions. Then I wasn’t supposed to be scheduled for the rest of the week, but one of the boys in housekeeping had dislocated his arm snowboarding and they needed someone to cover his laundry shifts. I told them I would do it, I didn’t think it would matter if I missed the staff ball, no one but Taylor from HR remembered it was my birthday anyway. As I was washing bathrobes, I watched everyone pass by as they clocked off work, putting on heels and fancy dresses and doing their makeup in the staff changing rooms. I couldn’t hear the party in the ballroom, but I saw everyone sharing pictures of the free food and wine on Instagram. When my shift finished, I went upstairs in my uniform alone. I had a slice of cake delivered from the Spaghetti Factory in the village, stuck a pre-rolled joint in it as my candle, and smoked until I knocked myself out.

The whole hotel was run so poorly, after Sasha moved out of the room, I think for a while they just forgot I was in there alone. For maybe two or three weeks, I went without a roommate entirely. By that time, I had been in the hotel for two months, eating out of the staff cafeteria every day and it was disgusting. We had found out by then that the cooks in the cafeteria were the ones who the hotel didn’t feel comfortable cooking for guests, because they were too slow or unhygienic. But whether or not we had proper chefs, nothing could save the food. Whether or not the food was good, nothing could save eating the same things on a rotating schedule for weeks and weeks with no end in sight. It just got to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore. The pay was so low, and my rent and bills came out of my paycheck before I got it and I didn’t have anything else to spend the money on but food anyway. So, for the time I didn’t have a roommate, I got DoorDash every single day. I spent a whole paycheck, after bills, on DoorDash. All I did was cry about my dog and my life in Canada, go to work, smoke weed and order food. Not to justify an unhealthy lifestyle, but there was also nowhere to go, nothing to do in this rural snowy town, and I had to order new food every day because I didn’t have access to a fridge. I was completely alone, having the worst time of my life, in this small Australian town on the other side of the world.

People noticed, I definitely gave off an air of not wanting to talk, and even those I got along with kept clear of me for a while. I had endless days of feeling sorry for myself, endless days of taking lunch late so I could cry in the cafeteria alone between cleaning rooms. I thought about my dog a lot, the money I wasted coming here, the time and emotion I wasted on Zach. I sometimes talked to this one girl in housekeeping, Polly, after my shift and she said she had gone through the same things when she moved to Whistler. Crying on the floor in the bathroom, questioning why she was here, regretting that she quit her office job in Australia to scrub toilets in Canada. She told me she was lucky to have a best friend with her but there were days without Maddie when she was alone and felt lost. Polly told me one day she just got on a bus and went to Lost Lake completely on a whim to feel better. That's what I needed to do, fill my days with random useless things to occupy my mind. She was right, I needed something to get over the disappointments and heartbreaks and loneliness, I needed to get out of Whistler again. I couldn’t quit because of my work contract and I didn’t know if I wanted to move to Toronto or leave Canada entirely. But I still had Mitski tickets for February, so I fought with management to give me that week off so I could go back to New York.

Different This Time

Eventually the hotel realised I was alone and decided to move me in with another new employee. On one of my days off they called the room, I answered, and they basically said, “oh good you’re here, go to the front desk to get a new key, you have to be out of there in two hours”. The place was ridiculous. I had a quick shower, got dressed, started packing my stuff, and not ten minutes later a housekeeper walked into the room without knocking to do a departure clean. Worse, it was one of the boys who had a crush on me when I started working there, and when I made it known I wasn’t interested, became consistently really mean to me. I told him to get out because I just got changed and I had barely started to pack. He tried to tell me I wasn’t supposed to be in the room anymore. I argued back that I had been asked to move out ten minutes ago, did they expect me to pack up everything I owned in 10 minutes! I even went to the front desk with my dripping wet hair to complain. I didn’t care if it would get me reprimanded for being a bad colleague again. I complained that a male housekeeper burst in, without knocking three times like we were required to do, when I had barely gotten out of the shower. I told them to keep housekeeping from coming to the room for an hour, they said I had two hours when they called why can’t they give me time to get out. Shit would’ve been illegal if it was any other kind of rental, but this fucked up job meant that your living and livelihood were too intertwined.

I moved into a new room at the hotel and got a new roommate, Bronte. She was such a sweetheart, much younger than me and had a hard time with her visa and leaving her family, so I really made the effort with her that I regretted not making with Sasha. We went for walks around the village, she didn’t like the food in the cafeteria either so we went halves on DoorDash most nights (maybe we gained a little weight together too). I started hanging out with more people from around the hotel again. I got over my grumpy attitude and took time to chat with other housekeepers. I started having lunch with one of the cooks from the restaurant, Jas, and we went out to a couple Latin nights together with her and Louis and other Hispanics that worked at the hotel. I bought tickets to Usher in Los Angeles in September, making sure I always had something to look forward to outside of British Columbia, and made Bronte and India from the restaurant watch his Superbowl performance with me at a bar in the village. I applied for some master’s degrees back in Australia for the next year, just in case I still couldn’t make it work out there and I got a tattoo I had been planning for years to remember my girl. A sprig of holly, for my Holly baby, in the crook of my arm where she rested her head and fell asleep when I was nine years old.

I was going back to New York, I’d had these Mitski tickets for months, and I was going to make the most of it. I hoped I’d be able to go back a couple times before I made my way back home to Australia or Toronto, but this was the trip I needed the most to bring myself out of my depression and find something to be hopeful about again. I took all my money out of my savings, rent was cheap, food was gross but free, and the job was stable, so why not. I booked a room for a week at The Plaza, with my insane staff discount it was relatively affordable for hotels in Manhattan, but still a little crazy. I planned everything else I wanted to do. I considered going to the Knicks vs. Celtics game, but it was much more expensive than seeing the Hornets, so I let myself think about it. I bought tickets to another Broadway show, Wicked, as the movie had recently released its trailer and Bronte was a massive fan who told me I had to go. She also told me to get cookies at Levain Bakery and I planned a few other food places I wanted to hit up while I was there. I even changed my hinge location to find some nice guy to hang out with. His name was Tim, he lived in Brooklyn, liked smoking weed, was into anime and art. He told me he was going to take me to the giant swings at the pier during the day and Juke bar for cocktails in the East Village at night. And then I fucked it all up because I thought to myself, do you know what else would make this even better? Do you know what would make this unbelievable trip I’ve planned, staying in the Plaza, seeing my favourite musician of all time, seeing one of the most popular shows on Broadway, eating all the food I planned to eat and doing all the things I wanted to do the last time? The guy I’d been thinking about for three years.

Things had blown over a little with Zach, I left things open after everything went to shit anyway, and as I was getting ready to go to New York the second time I made an effort to reach out to him again. It was just a misunderstanding, right? It wasn’t his fault his sister needed help with something, how could I blame him for standing me up? I overreacted and made mistakes too. We were still speaking, we were still a bit flirty, and I still wanted to see him after all that time, maybe he wanted to see me too. After a little convincing he said he did. We didn’t call each other baby anymore or make the kind of plans together that we had made the first time, but he told me he wanted to make it up to me. He has to work on this day and this day, but he wants to spend all his free time with me and blah blah blah…

It’s really an out of body experience when I look back on everything that happened. I see myself doing things that I didn’t feel comfortable with, or I knew I was too unsure of to be right, but I just dove headfirst into the dark water because I thought it was what I wanted. I wanted to stay in Canada even though it wasn’t right for me and I should’ve left after a couple weeks like so many others who didn’t like the job. I wanted this life I had planned for myself overseas, even though it obviously wouldn’t come to pass in Whistler. After all those years of build up, I wanted to see Zach again, even though he had made me feel so stupid and small the first time. But I was confused. He was saying he wanted to spend all his free time with me again, so what? That's what he said the first time. But also, maybe he means it now? I annoyed Kelsy and India at work because I was in two minds like, what am I doing, why am I believing this, please tell me I’m making the right decision. They said one more chance, why not? How many times are you going to be in New York? How many opportunities will you ever get to see what’s there? I think they were just affirming something they could see on my face that I really wanted despite myself. I did try to be more protective of my time when I commited to it. I told Zach I couldn’t hang out the night of the concert and to not bother the nights he had work. I told Zach I had a Broadway show to go to and I wanted time to myself as well. I told Zach maybe we should just have a one night stand. He was like okay… and I asked what was wrong? He said it looks like I’m coming up with reasons to not do this, so just forget about it.

I called him ten times because I couldn’t just forget about it. I didn’t care that he said he was busy, and he didn’t have anything more to say, and he didn’t want to talk to me. I practically begged him to talk to me because I felt I was losing another big thing and I couldn’t handle it. I apologised for telling him I didn’t want to spend time with him. I told him how stressed I was in Canada. I told him I was sorry I was holding the first time I was in New York against him. I took all the blame, and I can barely live with myself knowing I did that, but he did agree to see me again. My psychologist tells me that is a symptom of prolonged narcissistic abuse like breadcrumbing, when the narcissist discards their victim they react emotionally to the breakdown of the relationship. She tells me not to blame myself for not wanting to lose a person that had been in my life in some way for five years. I still find it so difficult to live with myself knowing I acted like that though he did change his mind and I guess in the worst way I got what I wanted.

We spoke on the phone before my trip to New York, and it was surprisingly fun. The conversation matched the vibe I had imagined for our first trip exactly, making me think this would finally be what I expected. I warned Zach that my roommate was nearby, so we needed to be chill on the phone. We caught up a little, talked about Lord of the rings and music and movies and whatever else came up. He did say one weird thing when we were talking about my culture, about how around the Tokyo Olympics, when everyone was talking about Fiji winning gold, he was telling one of his boys that he knew a fine Melanesian girl. He told me he showed his friend a picture of my grandfather on my Instagram, one I posted when he passed away, to be like this is what Melanesians look like, they are Black. I tried my best to ignore that, focusing on the fact he had mentioned me to his friends, so maybe I wasn’t so stupid for thinking we had liked each other for a few years. He told me he had to work more nights than usual, because some guy at his job was close to getting fired, but again he was going to spend every minute of his free time with me. He asked me excitedly if I wanted to go to McSorley’s again? I said a cold flat, “No”. Zach said we could do this and this, but he guessed we we’re “going to spend most of our time in bed” weren’t we. He hadn’t listened to me about my roommate being in the room, and I now suspect he didn’t even remember over a year ago when we were first talking about seeing each other again it was his idea to come to Canada, and I was going to New York because I knew the whole time that I would be living in a shared room. I abruptly cut him off and ended the call. There was no privacy in the hotel, I had gone to sit on the bathroom floor during the call so Bronte wouldn’t hear, but I wasn’t going to waste more of her time. Either way, I felt we were on good terms again.

It didn’t matter that I went crazy on him after my first time in New York, it didn’t matter that he stood me up. We weren’t affectionate like we were before, but we acted the same in other ways. He promised to be celibate again waiting for me, we would have unprotected sex like we’d wanted for so long, we’d do as many of the things we planned as we could this time. I was excited, I had gone through hell, and I was finally going to get one thing out of this whole horrible experience that I wanted. I bought all new clothes for my trip, an outfit specifically for Mitski and one for Wicked, and new matching sets of underwear for however many nights I was going to spend with Zach. I went to Vancouver the weekend before just to get my nails done and it felt so good to do something even that little to feel like myself again. I left things open with Tim, which I thought was selfish, but deep down I still didn’t trust the situation entirely and I didn’t want to be alone if Zach stood me up again. Before my first trip, I didn’t mind that many of the conversations between us were about sex, I like sex. In retrospect, I felt that for him everything was meaningless because that's all it was, sex. I don’t believe he understood why I felt hurt at all, which is still insane, he let me spend thousands of dollars to come to New York for him and stood me up. He seemed to think my frustration came from his lack of romantic feelings, but that wasn’t the issue for me, I never needed a deep emotional connection from him. I liked him a lot and really hoped something more might develop, but I wasn’t expecting love when I went to New York like he was constantly trying to reality check me about. I guess it just made him feel powerful to get to say “I never loved you”. I only expected to be able to trust him to follow through with the plans we made together. Zach didn’t seem to grasp what I wanted and I told him that I felt like he just didn’t understand me. My reaction was erratic and emotional but I hoped he now recognised that I felt that way because he betrayed my trust. I told him this time when I would be in New York I didn’t want to talk about anything that happened between us before, good or bad. I believed we were both clear we would just be spending time together to have fun.

Lonesome Love

On both flights, from Vancouver to Toronto and then Toronto to LaGuardia, sleep completely escaped me, and the night before I hadn’t slept a wink either. I had worked all day changing beds and scrubbing baths, then I said goodbye to Bronte and got on the bus to Vancouver in the evening without stopping. On the plane I slumped over, head resting against the hard plastic of the seat in front of me, desperately trying to will myself into unconsciousness, but it wouldn’t come. I couldn’t focus on a movie, I bought a roast beef sandwich from the flight attendant but I couldn’t keep a bite down, my body just refused to relax. I vividly remember contemplating whether I should fake being happy around Zach. If this was just a temporary distraction from my life in Canada, why not? But that’s not me, I was going to be genuine and take things as they came, even though I sometimes regret that decision now. After arriving at LaGuardia, a significantly better airport than JFK and this time with an e-sim to get into the city, I made my way to the Plaza Hotel. While I had been a zombie on the plane, my mind shifted into a manic daze as soon as I entered the Plaza. Walking up the red carpet through the revolving doors, into the guest-only lobby adorned with glittering chandeliers, it all felt too surreal. At the front desk, I checked in and received another room upgrade as Fairmont staff from a Plaza King to a Delux King. The attendant offered to have someone bring my bags up for me, gesturing behind me at a luggage cart piled high with what looked like fifteen suitcases and handbags. I couldn’t help but laugh, what kind of guests do they have that she’d assume I needed that much luggage for a week? I showed her the small carry-on at my feet and assured her I could manage on my own.

This time Zach had messaged me earlier, to see where I was and what I was doing, he said he was about to head downtown from his place in the Bronx. When I said I was tired he suggested we could leave it for later, but I told him no it's fine, I was just going to freshen up before I headed out. In my room in the Plaza everything was so expensive and gold plated, it was almost an assault to the senses. I don’t think I could really wrap my mind around where I was and I felt insane. I’m from Eaglehawk in Victoria, called “the borough” because it’s a hole, one of the poorest postcodes in the state and I was staying at the Plaza. I missed Zach’s messages when he was waiting downstairs because I was in the shower, and he went somewhere else while I wasn’t replying, so I waited in turn under the giant chandeliers in the lobby until he came back. Ten minutes later he said he was at the front door. I went out but I couldn’t find him, again he said he was right next to the door. I walked around the corner from Grand Army Plaza to 59^th street and there he was. He was on his phone, maybe typing a message to me to explain where he was. I walked up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hi Zach”.

We hugged, I was really excited to see him and I think he was excited to see me too, but I hadn’t slept in two days at this point and my brain really wasn’t comprehending things. He said he was going to take me to a sandwich bar, and I thought cool, but I felt crazy. He said something about not meaning to make me walk so far, if I was too tired, we could take the train. I said oh my god no, I needed the air. Then, as we were continuing down 59^th street, we walked past Fran Leibowitz. Fran Leibowitz. I watched her pass by us like a vision in the street and I thought to myself, was that… Fran Leibowitz? That was Fran Leibowitz. If I felt insane before, my broke ass checking into the Plaza on two days of no sleep, walking out the door to meet a guy I hadn’t seen in five years. Almost immediately walking past an iconic New York celebrity sent my brain into overdrive. Like where the hell was I? What was happening to me? I continued walking through Central Park with Zach and he said something about wearing a shirt from the Cure’s recent tour, telling me it would've been great if I was there a weak earlier to see the snow (like I didn’t work at a ski resort), and another thing about the park being designed so you would get lost and we had come out of it further than he was expecting. It didn’t matter to me, I had no idea where I was, like on earth. We got close to the sandwich bar but he complained about it having changed and kept walking right past it. Everything, the scenery, the plans, the people around me, Fran Leibowitz, was moving too fast, and my mind couldn’t get a grip on reality. We continued on until we came across a random restaurant on the same street, Zach asked, how do you feel about Thai food? I said I love Thai, so we walked in.

I took a photo of Zach when we got our drinks to send to Dan. I think Dan was shocked, I hadn’t mentioned to him that we’d been talking again since spending the weekend at his in Chicago. I ignored Dan’s messages asking me to tell him what the hell was going on, I could’nt multitask in that mental state, and I tried my best to focus on the lunch I was having. I really needed to eat, I just hadn’t slept for two days, I assumed that’s why I wasn’t hungry. When the waitress brought out my Massaman curry and coconut rice, I was like perfect! Back home, I ate coconut rice weekly, but I hadn't made it for months because I’d been travelling and I had no kitchen in the hotel. I had a few spoons of the curry and shared the sticky purple coconut rice with Zach, who had never tried it before, then I couldn’t eat any more. I was so confused, after relying solely on DoorDash, I didn’t undrstant why I couldn’t eat my first real meal in months. I think the week was just so emotionally overwhelming, I never considered something might be something physically wrong with me.

On the phone and in our messages, I had told Zach I wanted to avoid talking about my first visit to New York completely. I just wanted to ignore everything that happened between us and have fun this time, but he didn’t indulge me. He started recalling an entirely new set of events, apologising as he explained his roommate’s girlfriend had been living with them for eight months and had moved out just before I was flying there in November. Suddenly, that was why it was too difficult for me to stay with him. He laughed as he added that she had left them a large bag of weed as a thank you for putting up with her for so long. The small grip my mind did have on reality was like, girl, what?

As we left the Thai restaurant, Zach put his hand on my lower back to guide me out the door, and we started walking back to my hotel. He suggested we take the train again but I said no, my mind was still racing and I wanted to walk it off. I can’t remember if it was on the way to lunch, on the way back, or some other walk but he told me he was joining a casual baseball league that played in Central Park and I asked him what sports he did growing up. He said basketball mostly, and he remembered I played basketball too. I said yeah, I did, but I actually played more netball and he had no idea what I was talking about. I realised Americans don’t know what netball is and I had to explain that in the Commonwealth, it’s the most common sport that girls play. Culture shock for me. Same thing again I don’t remember exactly when we had this conversation, though I do know it was on that day, he told me he never walked down this side of Central Park. Actually, this whole bougie area of Manhattan, he’d usually avoid like the plague. Maybe culture shock for him too, it definitely was for me as it was my first time there, I avoided the bougie parts of Melbourne as well. We got back to the Plaza and I thought he was just about to head off to work, but he lingered, so I invited him upstairs to look at the room. Maybe that was naive of me given everything we had said to each other over the last three years, maybe I should’ve known what I was implying inviting him in, but I genuinely only meant, “do you want to see the room?”. No matter who I was with, if I had a key to a room in the most famous hotel in the world and they didn’t, I would invite them inside to pretend we both lived on the other side of the class divide. Upstairs, I never imagined things would go the way they did.

We went in the front door and I innocently pointed out the Palm Court, the chandeliers in the lobby and the mosaic P for ‘Plaza’ on the vintage elevator floor. In my room, I showed Zach more vintage furniture, how everything in the fridge was weighted and would automatically charge the room if you moved it, and that all the taps and faucets in the bathroom were 24k gold. While he was making a show of admiring the bathroom mirror, I noticed he didn’t have any shoes on. I immediately asked him, “did you take your shoes off?”, as if I wasn’t looking directly at this man with no shoes. He said yes, the carpet looked expensive and he didn't want to drag his shoes over it. I was bewildered. We walked back into the main room and suddenly the atmosphere changed. Zach came over to where I was standing next to the closet and started kissing me.

It was slow and awkward and it didn’t feel right. I was aware of how close we were to the bed so tried to tell him again how tired I was, how I didn’t want to do this right now, how I wanted to wait, maybe until he got off work. He didn’t push things further physically, or say anything to pressure me, but it was like he didn’t react to what I was saying at all. Like he didn’t even hear me. I stopped kissing him but he just kept his hands around my waist and his face close to mine, expectantly. I don’t know why I did it, I think I was too tired to understand what was going on and too confused about what he wanted after I already said no so many times. But, after a long moment, I asked him if he wanted me to take my clothes off. He said yes. Maybe I didn’t know how to say no again, maybe I didn’t want to disappoint him after feeling so hurt and rejected the first time, maybe I thought it was my fault he was even in the room. I asked him if he could close the curtain because there was an office building on the other side of the street. He went over and yanked one of the decorative curtains, not the actual blinds, most of the way closed. Then we took our clothes off and he laid on his back in the middle of the bed. Without protest I settled on top of him, with no foreplay, no protection, on my 48th hour of no sleep, after five years apart and maybe a half hour lunch, we had sex for the first time.

I don’t know why I dwell so much on the things we said for years before we met in person, but I didn’t think it would be like that. As juvenile as you could interpret our frustrated sexting, I still didn’t think it would be like that. He had told me so many times he wouldn’t put it anywhere near me until I was dripping, until he already got me off, until I was begging for it. I thought we had waited three years to be together, five years since I spent the night making out with the intern who assulted me in Ireland instead of him, years remimicing about that night and wishing we had made diffierent decisions together. And if that wasn’t disappointing enough, I just didn’t want to do it at all. Wasn’t this assault too? No, it couldn’t be. I just didn’t want to be this tired and checked out our first time, but I still wanted him even if I didn’t want it at that moment... right? I had slept with someone else in December, but I felt in some place in my heart I had waited for Zach for so long. I waited for him because I thought we had insane sexual chemistry. I waited for him because he was the first person who I felt mentally and physically attracted to. He had written to me so much about how he wanted to make me feel good and guys just don’t do that with me. Then, there I was, uncomfortably dry moving around on top of him, watching him silently look up at my body without touching me. I moved off and he went down on me for maybe a minute, an awkward stop on the way to the next sex act. Then he put me on my hands and knees at the edge of the bed and stood behind me. I tried to enjoy it, I asked him to pull my hair and I made a lot of noise to fill the empty air of the room, but it just felt demeaning. Like this inescapable physical epiphany of how wrong I was about him. He asked me if I wanted him to finish inside me or on my face, I uncertainly picked the latter, and he laid on his back on the bed again for me to hover over him.

We cleaned up and laid in bed to cuddle for a while, me across his chest as he played with my hair. He told me how good I looked when he finished on my face, I told him how good he tasted and wondered if it was because he was a vegetarian. He said he hadn’t been a vegetarian for a couple years actually. I felt weird, and I couldn’t stop saying I felt weird. I kept asking him, didn’t he think it was weird we were cuddling like this after five years? Maybe it felt weird because I’d never had sex when I didn’t want it before, maybe I was just tired, maybe I couldn’t get my head around what was going on. I said to him, you know, I really only asked you up to see the room, you know ,I really didn’t intend for this to happen. I couldn’t shut up, I think I remember he was quiet, I didn’t know if maybe I hurt his feelings. He got up to get dressed for work. I stayed in bed and I told him he could take my extra room key so he could come back later. He left with the key and that was it, I laid there in the too quiet room, silently staring at the ceiling until finally, sleep overcame me.

Tim had been messaging me because we’d had tentative plans to go out that night, but I replied to say I was sorry but I slept all afternoon and I didn’t feel like it anymore. Which, although somewhat true, I felt horrible about. But how could I let this nice guy take me out after having sex with someone else in the middle of the day? I ordered a cheese pizza, which I couldn’t eat either, and put Home Alone 2 on the TV. Zach said he was too tired to come over again after work, but we’d see each other tomorrow. The next morning, I put on makeup, got dressed in a new low cut brown top I had bought from Fashion Nova, and waited for him to hit me up again. He said he had a lot of chores to do around the house before work so he couldn’t spend the day with me anymore, but he’d see me later that night. Fine. The day before I had mentioned that Mitski’s concert was at the Beacon Theatre, and he said that was just a block down from his work, so I asked him if I could come for a drink before or after. He said no, he’d rather take me to the bar when he wasn’t working so he could introduce me to everyone. Disappointed, I took off my brown top, threw on my puffer jacket, and went for a walk around Midtown and Time Square. I’m usually not the type obsessed with tourist attractions, in a new city I try not to go to the same place twice, but there was a Jollibee in Time Square. Growing up my Aunty Judy, my mum’s best friend, would make us spaghetti all the time when we were kids so I needed to see how Jollibee’s Filipino spaghetti and fried chicken compared. It was nice, but the same as everything else I bought in New York, I couldn’t really eat it. I wondered what the housekeepers thought of me, constantly throwing out bags of uneaten food.

Back in the hotel I freshened up my makeup and headed down for the concert. Central park and the skyline of the lower east side was framed by a peaceful pink and lavender sky and all the New Yorkers had stopped in the street to photograph it, so did I. Then I began to walk up Broadway towards the Beacon Theatre. I wasn’t first in line, but I was early. I guess I had mostly bought standing tickets to concerts before and didn’t consider that with seats there would be no reason to be one of the first through the door. As I waited anticipation waned, and loneliness reared its ugly head. I often thought it really didn’t make sense that so many teens were such big fans of Mitski, she seemed very Millennial, and her lyrics are so deeply about loss and loneliness. But I got it as I was standing with the swaths of teens in line, all dressed up with their girlfriends, handing out handmade Mitski bookmarks and singing her songs. I thought after Zach bailed, I wanted to see Mitski alone, close my eyes and cry without shame listening to her voice. In line I realised I may not have wanted to share something this important to me with him, but I did wish I could share it with someone. If Zach had never agreed to come and let me buy tickets for him “for our late valentines” I would’ve gone in Chicago, maybe asked Dan, and watched Julia Jacklin open for her, but here I was alone. After I went inside, bought my drinks and my merch, I made a last ditch effort to ask my twitter followers if anyone was in New York and wanted a free ticket. A mutual of mine, a director named Clementine, said she wished she could’ve gone but Taino was already playing and it was too late to make it in time. Mitski’s red curtain lit up and a girl who was running late yelled at me to move so she could get to her seat on the other side of my empty chair, the one I had originally bought for Zach. The same girl asked me if her friend, one row back, could take the chair between us so they could sit together and I relented. Maybe I had this idea of how I wanted the night to go, grumpy and alone, but who was I to keep two teen girls from sharing this together. They said no thank you to me, just gestured I move my stuff as the friend took the seat, and Mitski started singing. She was fantastic I guess, but it was an emotional disappointment beyond words. I still can’t listen to her anymore.

After the concert I made my way back down Broadway and I stopped at Gray’s Papaya for a hot dog. It’s like, how can you fuck up ordering a hot dog? It's a hot dog. Well, I managed it. As I was throwing out the dog, I thought I spotted an actor from Only Murders in the Building. James Caverly, who plays Theo the deaf son of a neighbour in the show. I slyly walked closer to the restaurant he was at to get a better look. It was him, or another deaf man who looked exactly like him, signing to the people at his table. I thought, woah, another celebrity. I kept walking towards the Plaza, scrolling through my phone seeing what people had to say about the concert on Twitter. Everyone was going on about how Paul Mescal had been there and ran into Lucy Dacus, his ex-fiancé’s group mate from Boygenius, before the show. Again, I thought, woah, more celebrities. New York is a crazy place. At some point I remember Zach messaged me something like, “Yo, what’s the word?” or “Yo, what’s going on?” because he was just about to get off work, which I thought sounded like he was excited to see me. I told him I was a little tired after the concert but I’d love it if he came over. Then he told me he was too tired as well and he was just going to go home. The switch up made me upset, this was such an important day to me and he made plans with me before and after this big thing and blew me off both times again. I asked him why he said if he was going to spend all his free time with me if he was just going to keep cancelling, he made out like I was being unreasonable for not understanding he was tired. He said he’d see me tomorrow.

I didn’t leave it at that, I just wished I hadn’t wasted my breath arguing that my time was important, I wish I had just ended it. But this was important to me, he was important to me, we had been friends for five years and I wanted to take advantage of this small moment in time we had together. Why did it matter that we were tired? I didn’t expect anything, didn’t care if we had sex or just talked or laid around in bed or said nothing and fell asleep, I just wanted to see him. I asked him what the point was of making all those promises he made to me, again, if he couldn’t follow through. Why couldn’t he tell me earlier when he knew he would be busy, was he even going to bother to see me again? He said he just had chores this morning and now he was tired, he overestimated how much free time he’d have, he had been lying to himself really (eyeroll). He did want to spend time with me but, also, he had these soccer games the next couple of days that he needed to watch. He wouldn’t make plans after work anymore, but he would see me tomorrow, and on Sunday he didn’t have work so he’d spend the whole day with me. He’d make it up to me, he promised. I asked him where and when I was meeting him the next day. He told me he’d be at Cucina 8½ at twelve.

All I Need

When I was planning my trip to New York I imagined the Mitski concert would’ve been the greatest night of my life. Maybe I would’ve told Zach I still had his ticket and he would’ve come with me, when we were planning things the first time, he always said he could take work off no problem. I thought even if he didn’t come, we’d spend our first night together after it and I could surprise him in the morning with breakfast. Otherwise, I thought that if I went to the concert by myself, it still would’ve been a different personal and fulfilling experience and I would’ve enjoyed breakfast alone. It didn’t turn out like that, the concert or the breakfast in the Palm Court the next morning. I went down for my reservation and I thought, what am I doing here? The food was delicious and as Fairmont staff everything was 50% off, but with the Canada/US exchange rate paying $17 for a cup of orange juice it was still an unjustified knock to my dwindling savings, especially to sit there and feel so lonely. Back in December I originally planned to go to New York again with Claudia, immediately before this trip I was trying to find a guy to show me around and that’s how I connected with Tim. But I couldn’t maintain my friendship with Claudia through my depression, I blew Tim off for Zach, and here I was eating in the Palm Court alone. I had spent a lot of time going for walks around the village back in Whistler, openly crying as most people were hiding indoors from the snow, in the Palm Court I tried my best to stifle my tears. The waiter asked if I was okay, I charged the breakfast to the room, and I went back upstairs.

I put on makeup and my low cut brown top for lunch again, but I forwent the matching bra to my underwear, putting in effort like that just felt ridiculous for a guy I wasn’t sure even liked me. But we’d only seen each other once in person, and I was really tired then, maybe something different would happen this time. I walked to Cucina 8 ½, which turned out to be the very nearest Italian spot to the Plaza Hotel, and waited. Zach told me he was running late, but he was on the train and he’d be there in ten minutes, I waited. Twenty minutes went by while I paced around the door of the restaurant, kicked rocks along the empty street, and looked through the window of the dark and empty gallery next door. Zach messaged me again to say he was at the station and he was walking there soon. When he got to the restaurant he didn’t hug me, just said an awkward hello and I followed him inside. Cucina 8½ was in the basement, and he got a third of the way downstairs before he said “oh no”, and turned to leave. He said the place looked way too fancy. I agreed. He said the waiter looked at him like he shouldn’t be there and there’s no way he would go to a place like that. I agreed, it wasn’t my kind of place either. Same as our first lunch we just started walking down the street in one direction until we found the next closest restaurant.

Lunch was quiet, I didn’t have much to say and honestly, I was waiting for Zach to say sorry. Sorry for yesterday, sorry for the last two nights, sorry for making me wait in front of Cucina 8½ in the cold. He didn’t. We got our menus and both ordered eggplant pasta. I was aware I really hadn’t eaten anything in three days but when we got the pasta, it was, let’s say, far too al dente. I couldn’t eat any of it, but Zach didn’t like his either and both our plates went unfinished, so I didn’t think too much about myself. I joked that I needed to move the food around to make it look like I had eaten more and Zach bragged about an Italian spot he always goes to in Harlem. The eggplant pasta there was bomb, way better than this… I wondered why he didn’t take me there. While he was waiting to pay, and I quietly kept playing with my food, he started calling around sports bars nearby to see if anyone was playing this soccer game on TV. He found one and we headed towards it. Now I like soccer, like I really like it, I’m only saying soccer and not football in this memoir for communicability. Zach was a big Liverpool fan and I knew at that time Liverpool were doing really well, in Jurgen Klopp’s final season as coach. I knew that because my Dad is probably Australia’s biggest Liverpool fan. I didn’t mind that he wanted to watch these games while I was there, I knew they were important, but it felt very much like he had to take me somewhere because he backed himself into a corner and he really didn’t want to be around me. I felt like an imposition just for wanting to spend time with him. It was humiliating.

On the way to the bar we passed a bunch of street vendors selling knock-off designer bags and I recalled one of my favourite jokes from Broad City, he didn’t know the reference so I took a picture and sent the joke to my brother instead. Then he asked me about the Mitski concert and I tried my best to deflect, what was I supposed to say? That that concert meant so much to me, I bought these tickets for the both of us, but it was lonely, some girl yelled at me, and I blame you that I had a horrible time? At the bar I went to the bathroom to check my makeup after lunch and inside all the walls were covered in this ridiculous(ly cool) boob wallpaper, filled with names and dates and messages. I took a marker out of my purse, wrote my name in a pair I felt looked like mine, and coloured in the nipples to make them darker. I showed a picture of the wall to Zach and gave him my pen to see if they had something similar in the men’s, they didn’t. I wondered if he remembered when we wrote our names on the Italian restaurant’s walls in Wexford with Dan and my homestay sister Tyler in Ireland, but I didn’t mention it. We had a couple drinks and a chat, but conversation was still stale, mostly because Zach kept bringing up his ex’s and other girls he had slept with. He ended up doing that every day we spent together. I tried my best to justify it like, I guess if this is just a fling between friends, what does it matter if he’s thinking about other girls? In therapy with my psychologist months later was the first time anyone validated that I was allowed to be upset about that. That anyone could use the little time they had with me to think about other people, value my feelings so little that they’d share those thoughts with me and be so careless with the things they said around me that they wouldn’t notice my uncomfortable reaction, was upsetting. I tried to get my lick back in the moment by making an offhand comments about how hot the goalie was in the soccer game and how hot the violent hockey players were on one of the other TVs to see how he’d react. I couldn’t read him.

When we had been talking over the years, he would always recall this moment in Ireland when I got separated from the group at Hook lighthouse and he was sent to look for me. When he found me, I was staring out at the Atlantic ocean and I said to him there was nothing I liked more than looking at water, he’d say that was when he first thought he really liked me. He talked about it again at the bar. He also told me he always remembered another conversation we had in Ireland, when he said sex and food was going to bring the world together. I had said to him I didn’t want people to respect me just because they wanted to sleep with me, he said he thought that was really cool then and he still did now. To compare to that I guess, he started telling me about an Asian girl he used to sleep with who would ask him, a white man, to call her slurs in bed. I looked at him with disgust and he quickly added “only in bed”. I imagined him thrusting into some girl while he called her a ch*nk and I think at that moment my mind gave out. I was empty, disgusted, maybe even heartbroken. Every memory I had with this person felt perverted, the idea of who I thought he was shattered, the truth of my own stupidity weighing down on me so heavy I physically slumped in my chair. I managed to simply reply “fun” to his tails of racial trysts with an unnamed Asian girl. A growing pit in my stomach about the place my biracial Black body occupied in his mind, all the years I had been sending him pictures and videos of my body, and the first time he’d had sex with me.

Zach returned to watching the soccer game, as did I. At least, I faced my eyes toward it while my mind was empty. After a while he suddenly exclaimed “Murphy!”, and I took my eyes off the TV to look around the bar. I looked at him for an explanation, he replied “It said Murphy on the TV”. He pointed “That player's name is Murphy”. I looked back at the TV and he was right, there was my last name on the back of this player's jersey, taking up the whole wide space of this 60 inch screen, and I didn’t see it. I was looking right at it and I didn’t see it. Zach asked me, “You’re not watching this are you?”. I looked at him dumbfounded. “We can leave,” he said, already getting out of his chair and putting his jacket on “nothing is going to change in the last two minutes anyway”.

Back in my room we sat on the armchairs at the end of my bed. While my mind was battling against crashing waves of emotion, depression and disgust, confusion and denial, my body was fixed in misery. I remember so vividly drooping my heavy arms on each side of the chair, my legs splayed out limp in front of me, staring at the shoes on my feet my brother had sent me for my birthday. I think beside me Zach was waiting, I didn’t say anything, then he asked me if I wanted to “fool around?”. Was there anything I could do that was more demeaning? That lacked more self-respect? I had never even been with a white man before Zach, because of the familial pain of white men taking advantage of members of my family. I had only ever kissed two white guys before and one of them assaulted me. Yet, I’d already slept with this white guy, this white guy that calls Asian girls slurs in bed, this white guy that clearly didn’t like or respect me. But I liked him so much, I went to New York for him twice, wasn’t it all too late now. In for a penny, in for a pound.

We got up and I went to kiss him, but he said we shouldn’t kiss because he had a cold sore. I thought he didn’t want to kiss me because it was so awkward the first time, he was obviously just there for the sex anyway, whatever. We were touching each other while we were taking our clothes off and I just felt too ridiculous. Irritated, I asked, “You really don’t want to kiss me?”. He mentioned his cold sore again, I said I didn’t mind, and we started. He complimented my green panties and I felt embarrassed. Even though I kept the matching green bra hidden in the closet, now that I thought he didn’t like me I didn't want him to notice any effort I made for him. He tried to get me to ride it reverse cowgirl but I couldn’t feel anything. When I tried to adjust to make it better for me, he made an exasperated sound, shook me off, and put me back in doggy on the edge of the bed. This time he didn’t make a show of going down on me again but I went down on him. I blew him passionately until he finished in my mouth, I opened my lips slightly to let it ooze back down the length of him and he told me I looked like a demon. There was too much to wipe away with whatever we had nearby so he shot out of the bed to clean up and brought me a towel for my chin and hands. He seemed happy after, we didn’t cuddle but we made idle chat and listened to music. We made a blended playlist on Spotify to see how similar our taste was, 86%. I told him that was the highest I had with anyone, though I quickly added that my friend Eliza and I did it and got 90%. I didn’t want him to think I thought it meant anything, even though I kind of did, even though I never thought Eliza and I had very similar taste in music, we had just spent too much time together. This time, before he went to work, he kissed me goodbye and apologised for communicating poorly and being unreliable. Then I was alone again, naked in bed, waiting for a few hours until it was time for me to see Wicked on Broadway, listening to Give You My Lovin by Mazzy Star.

Later, Zach told a different story of how that day went.

I didn’t believe he had a cold sore, I thought there were just things he didn’t want to do for me, and whatever, at least I could try my best to make it feel okay. It was really hard for me to get turned on, really hard for me to get wet, which just wasn’t like me so I thought I just needed something more. I thought I needed something from him, even if it was fake, to make me feel that lustful feeling I had been waiting for. I needed him to tell me he wanted me, or he thought I was attractive, or I needed some pleasured reaction from him while we were having sex. He could’ve told me what he wanted to do to me, or what he wanted me to do to him, or… anything. Literally anything to show me this wasn’t just a convenient hit for him. That I wasn’t just a stupid girl who made a mistake coming to New York, a girl that was easy and said she wanted to sleep with him every day, so if we were in a room together with a shut door of course that’s what we were going to do. I was distracted watching Wicked, imagining how I could ask this guy who so clearly didn’t want to spend time with me and didn’t care for me, to take more time and care the next time we had sex. Between breaks in the songs and during the intermission I asked for what I wanted the best I could. I asked him to come to my hotel first on Sunday because I imagined if we got the sex out of the way maybe we could just spend a little time together. He replied, “I got you”. Maybe I’m the most delusional person in the world, but like everything he said, I really thought he meant it. We both knew what this was, we just needed to get on the same page, and despite everything else I was excited to see him again.

Shut Up Kiss Me

Sunday came around, it was the only day Zach had off work, the day he promised to spend with me, the day he said he’d make it up to me. I didn’t expect him to message me in the morning to confirm, I learnt by then he wouldn’t consider I needed that. I also knew he had the Liverpool game to watch and I thought, after I was such bad company at the sports bar, I’d totally understand that he would want to watch it alone. Only when it got to midday did I finally ask him where he was. He said he had chores to do around the house and he’d be at the hotel around five. I was upset again, more chores, more excuses, this might be the only day we ever get to spend together and he was wasting it. Forget the commitments he made, the three stupid years, the lustful feelings of type idiots who couldn’t decide what they wanted from each other, weren’t we supposed to be friends? I complained about the day before, I complained he didn’t say sorry for continually wasting my time until after we had sex, I complained he’d told me he didn’t have work and we were going to spend the whole day together. He asked what I wanted him to say? He had things to do and he was going to be there at five. I said he’d told me he was going to make it up to me. He replied he never meant he was going to spend the whole day with me. I asked if he could please come around a little earlier to go do something or hang out together. He said no, he would be there at five.

I went to MOMA alone, I cried a little thinking about how he used to tell me he would be with me at all these museums. I guess it was nice to see works by Kahlo and Dali and Water Lilies by Monet, nevertheless, I didn’t have a great time. I went to Ichiran in Time Square for lunch, trying to cheer myself up remembering how my brother and I went to Ichiran in Tokyo years before. I passed a lone Christian protestor covered in signs assuring that if you were depressed, there was a way out, and Jesus loves you. Were these literal signs from God, or a cruel joke from the universe. As I was walking around Midtown, I messaged Tim to see if he was doing anything that night. He said he was working but he’d love to see me. He worked in security so he wouldn’t get off until eleven, but if I didn’t mind, he could come find me after, he could take me to a bar then take me to Brooklyn. Even though Zach made me feel used and sad, it felt like a weak moment to try and find solace in someone else without them knowing the whole story, I’m not that person. I also didn’t want to commit to plans with Tim after he had work, Zach had already done that with me every night so far and still blew me off, it didn’t feel like the safe bet. I told Tim eleven was a little too late for me and I was really sorry I cancelled on Thursday. I wanted to come back in May, maybe we could link then? He said of course. I was resigned to my plans for the night and I headed back to the Plaza.

Sitting on the bed, watching TV, five pm came and went and I hadn’t heard from Zach. I messaged him to see where he was and he told me he was on the train on his way downtown. I asked him if we could go somewhere instead of him coming straight to the Plaza, for obvious reasons I didn’t want to have sex with him right away. He asked me to meet him at The Dead Poet on the Upper West Side. I knew I was going to walk there so I let him know I’d get there some time after six. He said he’d get there closer to six thirty as well. I walked alone through the dark of Central Park to the Upper West Side, passed the Natural History Museum and the moderate amount of people out and about on Amsterdam Avenue. I went inside The Dead Poet and found the last empty table, hung my puffer jacket on the wall and waited. Six thirty went by, seven, seven thirty, eight. I thought this is McSorley’s again isn’t it, I’m really that stupid. I asked Zach where he was, he said he was almost there. I asked if he was already heading to Midtown from the Bronx at five, how come it was taking him so long to get to the Upper West Side? He said he was sorry, he was almost there now. I sat at The Dead Poet alone, my savings teetering on empty, rejecting every offer the bartenders made to bring me a drink. I remember over the years Zach sometimes worked at this bar and I assumed when he finally walked through the door all the bartenders would realise they'd known who I was waiting for. Again, it was humiliating.

When Zach got to The Dead Poet, he immediately started introducing me to one of the bartenders, telling her we had been on the same exchange in Ireland five years ago. He didn’t like the table I chose and made me get up to sit at the bar. Once at the very front he continued to introduce me to all the other bartenders who had just watched me sit there silently waiting for him for over an hour. I was red with embarrassment and I suddenly felt uncomfortable in my makeup and my flowy green top so I put my puffer back on and told him it was because it was cold closer to the door. He said he was sorry he was late, he didn’t want to upset me by waiting too long to say sorry this time. I said thanks, flatly. He said he didn’t want to be presumptuous like the first time, but he brought a backpack to spend the night if that was okay. I chuckled indignantly at “presumptuous” and gave him a short “it’s fine”. Curious how he didn’t remember promising to spend the day with me but did remember we planned for him to stay over that night. He briefly embraced me with one arm as if to brush off the awkward part of the hello. I’m not going to say I couldn’t let him off that easily, the fact that I kept sitting there showed how much I’d already abandoned any self-respect, but I did question him. I said, accusingly, “I guess you weren’t on your way to Midtown at five if you only got to the Upper West Side at eight thirty”. He said he was, he just had to go back home because his dad called and his sister needed help with something. I asked him, “did his sister really need help with something or was that the same excuse he gave me when he said he couldn’t come to McSorley’s?”. Meekly he replied, “No, his sister did need help with something”. No mention of what, no mention of why he didn’t just message me to tell me that while I was waiting… I guess because it wasn’t real.

We drank and drank, as my mind started to dull from the alcohol, the conversation got easier. I complained that my phone was dying because I waited so long and I asked him to get a bartender to charge it, he did. We talked about soccer a bit, I asked how an American like him got into football, he said his dad was a Liverpool fan, mine too. He talked about his parents, his mum was a nurse, his dad cheated and it really screwed him up for a while. I didn’t speak as much about my own parents, cheating doesn’t even begin to compare to the violent toxicity of my family history, but I could relate to him. I did mention my mum had bad relationships in the past, she was very beautiful when she was young, and there were a lot of men who took advantage of her. After that he told me I was beautiful too. It was the only time he ever said something about how I looked in person, the only time he ever called me beautiful, as my mind lingered on the white men who had kidnapped, beat, and raped my mother as a teenager in Papua New Guinea. Zach asked me what a Papuan accent sounded like, I’m not so self-hating that I would make a joke of my people for a white man, I told him I’m sure he could find a video online. He asked if it was similar to the New Zealand accent? I laughed in his face, New Zealand is on the other side of the Pacific. He tried to mention something about West Papua but he called it Bali, maybe, I can’t exactly remember what it was but it was a completely different country. West Papua is the closest issue to my heart, I talked about it all the time, I talked about it with him in Ireland, and he didn’t even remember what the country was called. It made me realise, this guy never considered me did he.

I guess there was just nothing he could say that was right. I kept waiting for something to change, something to feel better. Some sign that he wasn’t just cracking jokes or putting on a show for me and the bartenders because that’s his personality. A sign he wanted to be there, with me. I was never going to get it, obviously, I was never going to get it, because he didn’t want me. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I could tell he was making an attempt to entertain me in the bar. I was really upset, I guess he had to do something to cut through how uncomfortable it was between us, but it came too late. I was too fucked over, he wasted to much of my time, everything he said and did proved to me how little he really cared. I just liked him so much, and I needed this weekend in New York so bad, I endured it.

We continued drinking, he said something about how his family went on a golf trip once a year, and I did my part to make the night awkward. Obviously, I had no idea what the golf trip was for or else I never would’ve said it, but I made a comment that his family must be really rich to play golf every year. He said they do it for his uncle. “Oh”, I said. “Who died”, he continued. “Oh, I’m sorry”, I said. “On nine eleven”, he finished, clearly offended. I huffed a laugh at myself and put my face in my hands horrified. I tried to play it off like, yikes, didn’t that conversation turn serious, which was really insensitive, but I had no idea how to react. Luckily, or just because it was so awkward, the conversation strayed to other things, back to music, as he seemed to have decided to finish up at The Dead Poet and go to another bar. He showed me an app to play a song over the speaker and picked Agora Hills by Doja Cat for me. I didn’t like Doja, but I really liked that song and I had played it for him the last time we were in bed together. Another girl at the bar started singing it with her friend, and Zach called out to her making wide gestures with his arms about how he picked the song and how “she”, flippantly waving at me, had showed it to him. Never letting a moment just be between us, always performing for the room. He left me with his phone to pick music while he went to the restroom before we changed venues.

At a bar across the road, Zach introduced me to a couple of his co-workers and a regular, I think, who was sitting at the bar. I had to make idle chit chat with them while he ate a sandwich. He asked me if I wanted to get food too, but not only did I still have no appetite, my throat was sore and I was starting to feel constantly nauseous. I thought to myself, it had to be that I had been drinking. We talked some more, played darts. He was getting ready for a darts competition with his dad, I wasn’t very good. It was funny he mentioned how I would focus really hard on lining my arm up and then let the dart go out of my hand without care, because that is exactly how my mum would try to embarrass me in front of everyone when we played bocce or went bowling my whole childhood. I started throwing the dart at the wall with even less care, willing the event to be over.

He kissed me after that. As I was leaning against one of the bar tables, he walked between me and the dart board and carefully pecked me on the lips. In therapy my psychologist has helped me consider that I have developed a tendency to catastrophise as I look back on everything that happened while I was in North America. I tend to interpret everything in the least charitable way or assume the worst outcome and that’s definitely what happened when Zach kissed me. But I just didn’t understand it. Everything he told me, everything he showed me, his demeanour, his thoughtlessness, his ease in dismissing my feelings about each day he blew me off after making such grand promises. It all showed me that he would never want to kiss me. He wouldn’t even kiss me in bed, when we were having sex, why was he kissing me now? A small, meaningless peck on the lips, in the bar where he works, in front of his co-workers. I knew he didn’t like me, was he just showing them there was no deniability why I was with him? Did he do this all the time? I wanted him to kiss me, every time I looked at him I wanted him to kiss me so badly. Then, when it happened, it was the most disappointed I’d ever felt being pecked on the lips to gently.

We kept drinking and my mind went from dull to dizzy. It took that much for us to actually get along and we kind of started having a great time. We took turns picking songs at his bar too, continuing until the place closed. I picked Throw Your Arms Around Me by an old Australian band called Hunters and Collectors. I was hoping if he listened to the lyrics, he would remember why I was there. He didn’t get it. He had never heard of Yung Lean, which I didn’t understand because he himself had made an album called Sad Boi, and Yung Lean is The Sad Boy. So, I played a couple well known songs by him too. Zach told me his favourite rapper of all time was Future (red flag), so we listened to him for a while. I was really giving Future a chance for the first time, listening to the flow and the lyrics and we bonded over how we were probably the only two people in the world who like the album Honestly, Nevermind by Drake. I loved that it was such a lowkey house vibe and Zach was telling me about how he was going through a breakup when it came out and he really messed with it. A breakup…huh. We’d been sexting almost every week since the pandemic started, for the last three years, but he was going through a breakup in the middle of 2022. The dizzy place my mind had reached with music and alcohol disappeared.

Before we went back to the Dead Poet to end our night out, I guess my panties were poking above the waistband of my pants, and Zach made a comment about noticing it and liking the pink lace. I said, “Oh that’s so embarrassing”, wishing my past self hadn’t been so delusional to think it was a good idea to buy all new underwear for this trip. Though at least I was recycling the plane black bra. I kept letting my emotions show, frustrated and unhappy, I thought about how I considered faking everything on the plane to make this weekend an escape. I regretted deciding to be myself.

Back at The Dead Poets two guys started to strike up a conversation with me. One of the friends, who reminded me of the actor Jeremy O. Harris, both in looks and tone of voice, asked me where I was from. I said Vancouver, feeling that it was close enough to Whistler, to which he turned to pull his friend close by his side and said, “His wife is from Vancouver!”. The same guy started going on and on about how his friend was from New York and his friend's wife was from Vancouver and they made it work, so you two (meaning me and Zach) could make it work! It was uncomfortable, I kept assuring the guy that Zach and I were just friends, but I was also kind of happy to be talking to anyone else so I just let him ramble on. Zach on the other hand didn’t acknowledge the conversation and started putting his arm around my shoulders, physically trying to get me to turn away, while the guy kept trying to convince me to give us a chance. Torn between the two, and annoyed at Zach putting his arm around me, I finally blurted out, “It’s not me, he just doesn’t like me”. The guy ended his insistence on me and turned all his attention to Zach. He was like, “Here I am trying to convince her, and it’s you!”. Zach's face was visibly distressed and I relented to turning our conversations inward until both of the friends went away.

When The Dead Poet was about to close, and Zach was finished talking to the bartenders, he flatly instructed me to get the Uber. I often fantasise that I would’ve said to him, something like, “Of course I’ll get the Uber, what’s your address?”. Used him for free drinks, like he used me, and sent him in a car home alone. I imagined I would’ve walked through Central Park, or even all the way to the edge of Manhattan to look out at New York bay. Watched the water crash on the piers and wait for the sun to rise by myself. Instead, I took Zach back to the Plaza. We went to lay down on the bed at about the same time, but as I was falling back, he snatched my pillow out from under my head and put it behind his own. Readying himself to get his dick sucked. I looked at him with the same disbelief I had when he was in my bathroom with his shoes off. I asked him incredulously, “Did you just take my pillow?”, and he sheepishly gave it back. We had sex in missionary, until he suddenly put his hand around me throat to start choking me. I was shocked into stillness and as I looked at him with more fear than obedience, he drew his arm back away and put me back in doggy at the edge of the bed. I think he finished inside of me, or maybe he just lost it and stopped, I couldn't really tell. Zach still wasn’t giving me head, whether he just didn’t want to I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t ask for it either in case he’d really had a cold sore. I really wanted him, I really wanted him to make me feel good, but the way he was treating me, I didn’t think I would get off no matter what he did to my body.

I’m no longer sure if it was this particular night, or some other time, but at some point, I got on my knees on the floor in front of him and started slowly moving my mouth up and down. Hilariously, he tried to thrust himself deeper into my sore throat to make me go faster without talking to me about it first and I tensed up and farted. A short loud toot. While Zach groaned like I was disgusting, fair enough, I was so weak I doubled over in laughter and had to hold his legs to steady myself. I thought it was so funny, I gave up holding him and rolled around on the floor laughing naked. Eventually, even Zach chuckled and made a comment about how it happened right when he hit the back of my throat. After such a tense horrible day, a horrible few months really, it was just a dumb moment of levity for me. It's so stupid, but I think that’s the only time I felt like the real me, light and quick to laugh, the whole time I was in North America. It’s the only thing I look back on that makes me smile, which is probably immature considering everything around it feels like emotional abuse and sexual assault, but I thought it was really funny.

Break It Off

In the morning Zach slept in, like slept in for so long it felt pretty obvious he was just trying not to spend time with me. I let him alone anyway, I’m the type to stay in bed until the absolute last moment and I knew he had work later. But then it started to get ridiculous. By that point I really hadn’t eaten anything all week and staring at the clock on my phone I started to get hungry. I decided to order something from Katz Delicatessen on Uber Eats while Zach slept but I thought it wouldn’t be a nice thing to wake up to if he felt me go downstairs and come back with food just for me. I touched his back and asked him if he wanted something to eat and he shot out of bed like “I’m up!” and went straight into the bathroom. He done that a lot while he was around me, constantly rushing to the next thing. At first I thought maybe he was nervous around me, by the end I wondered if he didn’t want my mind to linger on moments that would make me question his intentions. When he came back I told him I didn’t mean to push him out of bed, he could sleep in as long as he wanted, I just wanted to order something for him too. Ordering Uber eats in US dollars with Canadian money was a huge hit to the small amount of savings I had left, but Zach bought everything the night before so I felt like it squared out. We got Rubens, I ordered a single coffee just for him that ended up being $40 Canadian with fees so you can imagine how much the sandwiches cost, and went downstairs to pick it up while he had a shower.

Breakfast, brunch, whatever it was, it was awkward. I talked about my dog a little bit and how much I missed her, continuing one of our other conversations about my new tattoo. Zach met that moment of sincerity by talking about his ex, again, about how she, or they together, used to foster dogs. By this time, I had finally realised that all the exes he had constantly brought up during our dates were just one girl. In those little lunches he had with me before he jerked his dick off inside me and went to work, he didn’t just talk about her and that Asian girl he dated, he ran his mouth about so many women. A girl who he got his nails done with when I tried to show him my nails, how attracted he was to Zendaya for some reason. I’m not the type to be jealous or self-conscious, but in a situation where this might be the only time in the world we would spend together, I felt deeply taken for granted. And I mean what celebrity is more the physical opposite than me, than tall, slim, svelte Zendaya, though obviously that’s just my insecurity talking. I tried to share with him how Canada was going but I got the sense he really didn’t care what it was like for me out there so I moved on. I mentioned how I really wanted to move to New York, quickly adding “or London” even though that was a long ended dream. I didn’t want him to take it the wrong way or think it was about him considering how many times he felt the need to tell me he didn’t “love” me. I talked a bit about how getting visas to the states for Australians is impossible and that was the only reason I was in Canada. I asked him if he would ever come to Canada, because he mentioned his family go skiing together, the implication being if he would come to see me. I knew deep down he didn’t like me, but we’d just spent the night in bed together, I was still hopeful I hadn’t wasted my time. He immediately said “No”, and I sat there quietly in my rejection. He went on to say he really wanted to go to the Pacific NorthWest and he had a friend who recently moved to Toronto. I don’t know why he did that exactly, a pitying way to soften the blow or a way to keep breadcrumbing me when he knew he could get more out of me. He packed up his stuff to go to work again shortly after.

Zach and I walked through Central Park on his way to his bar. I asked him to take a picture of me with the Plaza in the background. Whatever came up I thought we were having a good time, in my heart I knew this was all a mistake so I was trying my best to enjoy his company while I had it. He talked about wanting to get a haircut, I whined that I liked his hair longer but I don’t think he got that I was kidding. He talked about how his mum didn’t let him watch WWE growing up, and my brother was big into professional wrestling, so I showed him some of my favourt attitude era clips. We were laughing, we felt like friends. When we were almost at Amsterdam Avenue again, he said, “You know you don’t have to walk me all the way to work” and sent me in the other direction with another peck on the lips, less careful this time, more dismissive. I didn’t realise I had been walking him to work, he wasn’t supposed to start for another few hours, I just thought we were spending time together... I walked back towards midtown embarrassed and alone and we didn’t see each other again until my last morning in New York.

There are some memories, with Zach and by myself, almost six months down the line I can’t place so well anymore. I remember we took the subway once and Zach tried to show off by knowing the names and corresponding colour of all the lines. That confused me because why should I be impressed he knew where the trains went in the city he’d lived his whole life? Another time, maybe that morning, he said the setting I put the shower on was perfect. I thought a lot about asking Zach if I could go to his house to cook for myself for the first time in months, but he was continually telling me spending time with me was was less important than chores, so I never felt comfortable to ask. Either way, the most important things, or I guess the things that caused me the most pain, linger clearly in my mind. I’ve tried my best to recount everything as honestly as I can.

On Tuesday, the sensitive area between my legs was itching and burning and it also started to hurt when I used the restroom. I took my only bath in the Plaza soaking tub, with whatever bath salts they kept in the room, to try and soothe it. It didn’t work. I put the fragrance free lotion I had bought for my new tattoo on thinking it might just be razor burn. Nothing seemed to ease the feeling. I tried to take pictures of myself down there but I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong with me. Just an itch I guessed. Maybe the pain had something to do with the nauseous feeling I started noticing when I wasn’t tired, drunk, or hung over. Looking at those pictures now, my bare self splayed out over the white and gold mosaic Plaza tiles, showing the almost imperceptible spots of disease. I wish I would’ve known to try and find a doctor on my last full day in New York. I still tried my best to order some good food through the nausea. When I knew I was going to move to North America, I was dying to finally have real, good, Mexican food, and I saved that for my last night in New York. Back in Whistler there was one, horrific, Mexican restaurant so I spent days researching where I was going to go and decided the Birria Landia taco truck was the place. But I was too sick and sad to go out, so I just ordered it on Uber Eats to have at the hotel. Too sick and nauseous to be excited about it, I ordered the tacos without cheese. Too sick and nauseous to eat it, I had one while they were hot and left the rest on the ottoman in front of the TV. To this day, I’m still disappointed I didn’t get to enjoy those tacos.

On my last night in New York Zach came over at around one in the morning after work, it was the only time he came into the Plaza without me, though I had given him a key to the room on the first day. Sometimes I think that's the only reason he came over that night, to give me back the key he never used. We slept together again, doggy on the edge of the bed at first but I tried to turn over to look at him, he just couldn’t stay hard when I did. Not that I felt he was into me at any point that week, but was I really that unattractive to him? He said he was just tired after work and we laid down silent for a while before he asked me if I wanted to sixty nine. I straddled his face and gave up doing my part for him quite quickly. If this was all I was going to get, I’d try my best to feel something. My mind was racing with thoughts of all the ways he had disrespected me, disrespected my time and my feelings, while I was in New York and when he stood me up the first time. I tried to quiet it with false sounds of pleasure filling the cold, empty room and when I’d had enough trying to make myself feel something, I went to move off him. However, with only moderate force, Zach held my legs in place to keep me on his face. My fake cries became real and he made me finish for the first and only time. I slumped off him, exhausted, and laid on my back to shake and convulse until I came down from my peak. I don’t know if Zach was making an attempt to talk me through it, or was just commenting on what he saw, but arms at his sides, far from me on the other side of the bed, he told me I looked hot shaking. I told him that was embarrassing, what could be more embarrassing than letting a man who hated me so much make me feel this way, but I thanked him for holding my legs in place. I’d always wanted someone to do that for me. He started talking about himself, how he must’ve really found my sweet spot, how he ate me out so long his jaw started to cramp and it was hard for him to breathe, how he wasn’t going to let me move until he heard me tell him to stop. The moment didn’t feel like it was for me anymore.

I had to be at the airport early for my flight back to Vancouver so I didn’t really sleep, just asked Zach to hold me while I rested my eyes. Only a few hours later it was morning. In the dim light of the room I could sense that he was awake, so I turned to face him, his back to me, and asked if I could say a proper goodbye. He stilled. I waited. Nothing. I got out of bed to silently go to the bathroom, turning to look at him as I passed around the dividing wall. He was already looking back at me over his shoulder, he had been pretending to be asleep. I told him I was just going to have a shower and turned my naked back on him to leave the room. He watched me finish packing my bags almost wordlessly, followed me down the elevator to check out and wait for my Uber to LaGuardia on Grand Army Plaza. A sky of fog hid the New York City skyline from view and we shivered on the street in the cool morning air. I told Zach he didn’t have to wait for my Uber, he said it was okay. I lied, and told him the car was just at the lights at the next intersection, so we could say goodbye now. We kissed, almost passionately, and I held his face in my hands while I admitted that I had the biggest crush on him. A crush, because I knew there was nothing mutual in this at all, and there never had been. I said a sad goodbye, I said we’d probably never see each other again. He disagreed as he walked away. He told me we would see each other again, that we would meet somewhere in the world. I shook my head.

I wish I could say the story ended there, a tragic tale of a foolish girl who tried too hard for a thoughtless boy, who put her dignity on the line for one happy weekend and got her heart cruelly broken. But it was the months of mistakes and confusion that followed that were the real pit of my time in Canada.

While I was in the Uber to LaGuardia, I checked my emails and saw that my flight was cancelled. Not delayed, cancelled. I had to get to Vancouver before six pm to get the bus I had already paid for back to Whistler, or I’d have nowhere to go. When I got to the airport I tried to figure out what other options I had, but the attendant was extremely short with me. She said either I check in now and wait in the airport to be contacted for when flights resume or I come back tomorrow. I asked her if I would get to Vancouver in time, she said that's not for her to say, I asked her if I could be compensated for the cancelled flight and given somewhere to stay tonight, she said because the weather, it was out of their control and they wouldn’t offer me anything. I had nowhere else to turn, I paced around the airport for an hour and called my dad to try and come up with some other way to figure out the situation, I had no luck. I recounted what happened to Zach and asked if I could crash on his couch for a night. He said no immediately. He suggested I go back to the Plaza, but I said I couldn’t afford it. I asked him again, like it’s just one night, was he serious? We had spent last night together, woke up in the morning together, we kissed goodbye and he promised to see me again. If we were friends, surely, he wouldn’t leave me with nowhere to go. He told me if I was his friend I would respect his “boundaries”, but he’d Venmo me $50 for a hotel. Dan said he’s sorry but it sounded like he had plans with someone else that night. Momina said that's not your friend, who wouldn’t give their friend a blanket to sleep on the floor.

I checked in with the attendant and went through security to hope the fog would clear and wait for flights to resume. I bought a Wendy’s baconator and sat with it, again uneaten, in the food court debating whether I was watching J. Smith Cameron, who played Gerri in Succession, and Kenneth Lonergan, who directed Manchester by the Sea. It was. Some hours later, flights were no longer grounded, and I got on an Air Canada plane to Toronto. As the plane was landing however, we were told that all flights to Vancouver were also grounded because of the heavy snows in British Columbia and I started crying. Without somewhere to stay in New York, I desperately needed to get to Vancouver before six. I begged the flight attendants to put me on any seat going to Vancouver. I was by myself, I didn’t have checked luggage, I felt extremely sick, please I had to get there before my bus left. She took pity on me and said she’d see what she could do. After a few hours waiting again, I was on the final leg of my flight. On the plane the sickness, the burning between my legs, was overwhelming and I went to the restroom on the flight to took pictures down there again. Small blisters had come to a head all over me, I didn’t think this was a razor burn anymore. I went back to my seat sick and exhausted and waited for the plane to land, messaging Zach to try and figure out what happened between us that weekend? Would he see me again? And why didn't he let me stay the night? He said we’d talk on the phone tomorrow.

In Vancouver the seatbelt sign turned off on the plane at 5:55. I stood in the aisle, staring at the clock on my phone, as I waited anxiously to disembark. 5:56, 5:57, 5:58, 5:59, 6:00. I missed my bus. The last bus of the night that went to Whistler. At the information desk I asked Air Canada what I was meant to do, I had nowhere to go and this wasn’t my fault. They said it was out of their hands, they said if I wanted accommodation for the night from them I would’ve needed to request it before I started my journey in New York, or on route in Toronto. I told them I would’ve never gotten on the plane if the attendant in New York hadn’t told me there was nothing they could do for me there, if they had told me flights were also grounded in Vancouver. No one had told me to seek accommodation in Toronto, they just pressured me along the whole way to get on the next plane. Were they saying that because I was there, I couldn’t receive any help? They basically said yes, because I had arrived at my destination there was nothing they could do for me. They offered me a brochure of hotel rooms that they had partnerships with, said I could book one for the night and then request to Air Canada to refund the money, but I couldn’t even afford them. I tried to get a discounted staff room at the Vancouver airport Fairmont, but I couldn’t because they needed to be booked in advance. I gave up and got an Uber into the city where I knew there were a few hostels within walking distance of each other. I showed up at the same hostel I had stayed my first time in Vancouver and asked for a bed for the night.

At the HI hostel downtown, I shivered through my blankets and spent the night on Web MD and reddit trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I even took a picture of my vagina and posted it on an “is this an STD” subreddit to be as sure as I could. Turns out I had contracted Herpes. In the morning Zach said he would call, so I half slept and half waited. When I answered the phone, he told me he was glad I got home safe, I told him I wasn’t at home safe, I was in a hostel in Vancouver. He asked me what I wanted to talk about. I said well, first of all, you gave me herpes. He asked me how I knew. I said because I could see it. He told me it couldn’t have been him so it must’ve been someone else I slept with. I told him he was the only person I slept with, I was with someone in December but I used protection with him, and Zach had a cold sore while we were sleeping together obviously it was him. He denied it immediately and said herpes can be dormant for 10 years, there's no way of knowing for sure. I said I guessed it could just be a razor burn… I didn’t know what I was looking at anyway. I got quiet, I didn’t understand why the conversation was going this way. I was so confused by his lack of empathy that all the things I planned to say on the phone slipped away from me. I tried to draw the conversation to the points I needed to get out but I was sad and stressed and I was taking too long, he said he needed to get his day started, and he hung up on me. I asked him if I could just send him a few questions and he could reply whenever he was able. He said sure.

The conversation was so painful, even now I struggle to recall it and put the words down on paper without curling into a ball to weep. I knew there were lies in everything he said, ways he absolved himself of guilt and shifted the blame to me, but it also felt like he was right and I was just a horrible stupid girl. I guess that's how gaslighting works. No other experience in my life has made me feel more worthless, more like a joke, more unworthy and unattractive and flawed.

I asked Zach if I came back to New York in May would we see each other again. He said no, only as friends. I asked Zach why he did all this with me, all this to me, if he never intended it to go anywhere? He said he just got caught up again, he guessed now we live in a world where people make connections online, but I should’ve known all along it was never going to happen. He said he imagined we would travel and meet in different cities all over the world to have sex, but he didn’t want that with me anymore. No, this did not happen to me because of some porn brained sexual fantasy, he never even came to Spain. I told him that was insane, he had never said that to me before, why would he think I would ever want that? Why would he let me go to New York for that? He told me it was what it was, we tried our best and nothing sparked, we worked better as friends. I told him of course nothing sparked, he shamed me for wanting to spend time with him, he treated me horribly, he spent the whole time talking about his ex, he didn’t even try. He told me he guessed he should’ve referred to her as his friend instead of his ex, like it would’ve made a difference to do the exact same thing but hide it. I asked him about Honestly, Nevermind, if he was going through a breakup when it was released, does that mean he was in a relationship while he had been talking to me? He said no, he had broken up with his ex two years ago, but they had gotten back together and broken up again. Ignoring that meant the answer to my question wasn’t no, it was yes, I also asked him if that meant that the whole first year we were talking to each other, that he was in a relationship with her? He said he thought we started talking at the end of the pandemic, and he and his ex were in a “tailspin” anyway, but yes, he was in a relationship with her.

I was a joke, not just a girl who overreacted, a girl who showed unattractive sides of her personality and turned off a guy she liked, but a complete joke. Someone he used as a meaningless side of attention, telling me all the things he remembered about me and the places he wanted to go with me and the things he wanted to do with me, for three years, while in meaningful relationships with someone else. I felt myself realising all I was to him was an only fans girl, like it didn’t matter who I was as long as he could solicit pictures and videos of my naked body, custom made for him for free. I felt like I wasn’t human anymore, just some AI he would feed romantic messages to, to receive compliments about his dick. It suddenly made sense how he uninvited me a week out from staying with him, how he could get “caught up” for three years, how he could make all those plans with me and encourage me to spend all that money and commit all that time to him without thought. And do it again and again, and blow me off again and again, and leave me sitting at bars for hours and hour, and leave alone in bed after he was done using my body. I wasn't even a person to him, I really was just an object in his phone to use and abuse emotionally when he was bored or feeling disinterested in his girlfriend. How could there ever have been a consequence to the things he was saying to me for so many years if I was never real. Nothing he did to me would ever affect his life, I didn’t know anyone he knew, he’d never have to see me again when he was done with me. I felt like I had been catfished, like if I never met him in Ireland and never guilted him into seeing me after he stood me up, this would be one of those insane story of a person who couldn’t see the writing on the wall when someone never called and always had an excuse to not meet up in person. I asked him again, how he could do this? How he could waste my time in New York? He said he didn’t realise I had feelings for him until he saw me in person. I asked, but he still spent the whole week with me. He said he didn’t realise he didn’t have any feelings for me until the last morning we spent together, until I tried to say goodbye to him in bed. I told him that was complete bullshit. I asked him why he still kissed me in front of the doors of the Plaza and promised we’d see each other again. He said he made a mistake.

Them Changes

When I got back to Whistler it was almost impossible to get an appointment at the only doctor’s office in town. When they finally were able to offer me an appointment, they told me if I was short on money I could wait for Thursday to be seen by someone at their sexual health clinic for free. So, I did, I endured the pain, nausea and burning sensation for another few days, as the herpes blisters bloomed all over me. It was unclear whether I was supposed to book an appointment on the day or just show up at the hospital for the clinic, so in the morning I called and called and called. Nobody answered. I put on my boots and coat, and trekked through the heavy falling snow, every step agony as the now open blisters rubbed together between my legs. However, when I got to the hospital on the other side of the village I found, because of the blizzard conditions, the clinic doctors were unable to get into town and it would not be running. Depressed, defeated and sick, I went downstairs to the emergency room to see if someone would see me. I thought I just needed an antiviral to start the healing process and stop the spread of the herpes. They told me someone could see me at emergency for that, but without public health it would cost me, up front, a minimum of $1000 Canadian. I tried to ask my father for the money and I’d pay him back when I claimed it on insurance but he wouldn’t help, so I walked all the way back to the Hotel again. Once home I called the office once more to beg the doctor to see me. I said I knew they were booked out for weeks but please, if they had any cancellation at all I would be there as quickly as I could.

The pain was so bad I couldn’t work, I just spent days after I returned from New York lying in bed trying to will something to change for me, watching the herpes spread and blisters burst. Not only that but the hotel overbooked the rooms again and this time we wouldn’t be moved from doubles to singles, we would be putting out belongings in a conference room overnight to be totally moved out of the Hotel. We were given taxi vouchers to get to and from the ski in apartments further up the hill and a $200 Fairmont gift card as compensation for the inconvenience, but it felt like it wasn’t enough. As I was putting all my worldly belongings on a cart to store overnight, I got a call to say if I went to the doctor's office right then I could be seen by someone. I was so lucky I had Bronte to take my luggage for me or there would have been nothing I could do and I would’ve missed my only chance. Hiking at a painful pace across the snow and $100 later, I had my feet in stirrups while the doctor swabbed the open lacerations between my legs. She couldn’t believe the state of me, the severity of the herpes, she asked why I hadn’t come in sooner. I told her I tried, but I couldn’t get an appointment and I wasn’t 100% sure what it was anyway. She said I didn’t need to wait for the swabs to come back, it was very clearly a first infection of HSV, they are only that severe when it is a first infection. She wanted me to get a blood test too, to be safe, and the swabs would show if there was anything else I needed to worry about. She asked me if I had any other symptoms, I told her about the nausea, and she said that's not a herpes symptom, so let's do another test. That whole time that I couldn’t eat, how uncomfortable it was for me to give oral, finally made sense. I had also had strep throat for the first time while I was in New York, nauseous, debilitating strep throat. I got my first 2 prescriptions and an anaesthetic cream for the painful open wounds from the drug store, then headed to the ski in apartments to wait for my overnight room.

I waited for hours, nauseous, in and out of sleep in the lobby, while families burst through the doors with their skis and snowboards, taking their gear off on the couches around me. They looked at me like I was obviously in the way but I was too weak to move, apart from going up to the desk now and then to ask if the room was ready. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon, when even Bronte had finished her shift at work and made her way to the apartments too, that we were able to go up. Poor Bronte had a stressful day and threw up before we got as well, unrelated to the illnesses I had, so we were dying to quietly rest. After picking my bed, settling in, and finally feeling the cold relief of the anaesthetic cream, I decided to make the most of the night in the apartment. Jas was staying on the same floor, and together we got a cab to the grocery store to buy food to cook for ourselves for the first time since we moved into the hotel. When we got back however, the girls Bronte and I were meant to spend the night with, had come in and we all got into a huge argument. One had invited her friend to stay and the other was bringing over her boyfriend to spend the night. They were trying to make us move from where we had decided to sleep to accommodate them. It was a 4 bed apartment and suddenly six people were supposed to stay there. I told them they can't do this, it’s one night just stay in your assigned rooms and don’t have your boyfriend over. I told them I had spent the morning at the hospital. I showed them my prescription medication I exposed that I had herpes and strep throat and I just needed a break. One girl left when I asked her directly but the other wouldn’t budge to mine and Bronte’s pleas. We argued with her for ages, saying that we were sick, saying she was staying in the lounge room, we didn’t want to be stopped from using the bathroom because she was fucking her boyfriend in the middle of the apartment. She said well, we're all sick sometimes, and it’s too late, he’s already coming over. We gave up, infuriated, I took my groceries to Jas’s apartment to cook with her instead.

I shared everything I made with Bronte, Jas and another girl called Camryn, both because I bought too much Atlantic salmon, bok choy and potatoes to cook and because the strep killed my appetite. That was the first moment I actually realised how serious strep was, because even after all that time, four months at that point eating DoorDash and the disgusting cafeteria slop, I couldn’t eat my own fresh food. When we were on the balcony, sharing mashed potatoes and cans of coke, I heard the girls from our room telling other people on the balcony next door that I had herpes. I went back inside to cry in frustration. I was given this painful incurable disease without my knowledge or consent, I didn’t think it was something to be particularly embarrassed about so I told a few girls hoping they would understand and empathise that I needed a quiet space for the night, and I was being publicly shamed for it. All the girls who were gossiping about me worked in housekeeping with me too, I always wondered how far my STD status went around the hundreds of twenty somethings working in the hotel, and I never looked at them the same again. I'd hoped once I was on the antiviral for the herpes and the antibiotic for the strep throat my health woes would come to an end, but it was only the beginning.

I was in physical pain, emotional pain, every kind of pain all the time. The pain of the memories of everything that happened while I’d been with Zach, the pain of the mistakes I made trying again and again with him, the pain of my changed body in the aftermath overwhelmed me. I tried to force myself to go back to work but I was just too sick. My doctor called with the results of my swabs and said I also came back positive for bacterial vaginosis, usually something they would only treat with antibiotics if you showed symptoms, but I was so sick and my symptoms were so severe for the herpes and the strep throat she put me on a course for it regardless. There was no point waiting to see if things did or did not clear up after days of antibiotics and antivirals if we were just going to find out I needed more. So, we added another round of antibiotics to my daily pills. Luckily my blood tests came back clean but after the bacterial vaginosis diagnosis as well, I asked Zach if he had been lying about not sleeping with other people and told him he needed to get tested to show me his STD results. I deserved to know everything I was exposed to. Again, he said he would get tested.

For weeks I had to ease myself passing urine by pouring warm water on myself as I used the restroom. I way taking five pills a day, apply anaesthetic cream at least three times a day, and laying down in bed through the nausea of the strep throat and all my other medications. When I finally felt like I was getting better, Bronte and I went out for lunch. She was so sweet to me while I was kind of bedridden. I couldn’t eat much and I slept all the time, but sometimes I would wake up to gummy bears and cookies and whatever treat she would leave me on my pillow. To get me out of the hotel, and have a break from cafeteria food together, one day we decided to go to an expensive restaurant in the village. That was when I first noticed it was kind of uncomfortable for me to sit down, not in the same way as it was for the herpes and bacterial vaginosis I mean, but I decided it was just the lasting effects of that anyway. I started to get emotional thinking about what I went through and Bronte noticed, both the tears welling in my eye and how quiet I had gotten, so I tried to play it off. I don't know why, it could've just been the constant physical reminders, but I would get overwhelmed at the most random times with pain and sadness and regret, even when I was doing a nice thing like going out to lunch with a friend.

Over the next few days, the pain sitting down, the pain walking, the pain even just keeping my legs together got worse. So, I paid another $100 to see the doctor again. This time she said it looked like I had developed a Bartholin gland abscess, meaning what might usually be just a swelling of fluid in the glad because of a blockage, this time was infected. She said it could’ve been the herpes or the Bacterial vaginosis that led to the infection, or something that infected the gland, like gonorrhoea, that I didn’t otherwise show a positive for in my swabs. Either way, I needed to encourage it to drain. My choices were sitting in a warm bath a few times a day or going to the emergency room for a procedure to cut it open. I tried the bath, while Bronte was at work, I would sit in the tub for hours at a time, constantly topping up the hot water. But nothing would ease the pain or release the infected fluid, in fact it got worse. The gland swelled to more than the size of a golf ball, pushing on everything around it. In and around my sensitive area swelled in pain, everything was red and inflamed and my soft inner labia blew up like balloons. There was no way at all to be comfortable, elevating my hips or spreading my legs did nothing to alleviate the pressure because the swelling was inside the wall of my vagina. I considered the $1000 for the emergency, I asked my parents for the money again to pay them back with insurance, they said no and I still couldn’t afford it on my own. I was desperate, the pain was debilitating, every time I got out of bed I could only waddled around at a snails pace in pain. Every time I left my room all my coworkers saw me taking slow careful half steps down the long hallway and asked questions. It was just horrible and I couldn’t take it anymore.

I laid down in a shallow hot bath, with a needle soaked in boiling water and burned with the lighter I used to smoke weed to “sterilise” it, fully prepared to stab through my vaginal wall and in an effort to get the fluid to drain out, but the pain was too much. Even just gently pulling at the fat of my inner thigh to get a better look made my ears ring and my head feel faint. I couldn’t do it. I waited for 9am Monday morning, laying on the cold bathroom floor in tears trying to get through to British Columbia health to beg them for a way to let me go to emergency for free. I had applied for public health months ago, I should’ve been on their system by now. Turns out I was, turns out I had been accepted on March 1st, the same day I first had an appointment with a doctor. Turns out I shouldn’t have paid for a single visit, I just hadn’t received my card and health care number yet. I took down the number verbally, used my remaining taxi voucher from the night in the ski apartments to get to the other side of the billionaire, and waddled into the Emergency Room.

In emergency I was in so much pain I was seen quite quickly, they took my details, details about my history and sexual health, and moved me into an operating room. The doctor told me that the Bartholin gland is what makes you wet when you get aroused, so I guessed the blockage is why I never felt wet with Zach. They also told me that there was a possibility that if I didn’t heal from this, or I got more cysts which was common after you had it once, I would have to see a gynaecologist about getting the gland removed. I understood that meant I might never be able to get wet with a sexual partner again and I began to panic. I told them I was doing fine, I never had trouble with pain or needles, so I was given morphine and one shot of fentanyl in a IV before they started to inject me with local anaesthetic. If the anaesthetic was working, I couldn't tell, I was in horrific pain everywhere below my waist. As they pushed on me to reveal the “head” of the abscess inside my vagina my eyes began overflowing with tears and I couldn’t help weeping and crying out in pain. The nurse quickly gave me another dose of fentanyl and let me squeeze his hand while he told me everything was going to be okay. As the scalpel cut through my vaginal wall I couldn't exactly feel it, but the pressure as they pushed was the most horrific physical sensation I had ever experienced in my life, and they weren’t done. So the gland would be completely rid of the infected fluid, and to try their best to save the gland, they had to stuff the open wound with gauze and leave a tail hanging to encourage it to drain out. I thought to myself, if I was in that much pain on so many painkillers and local anaesthetic, I couldn’t imagine what it would have felt like without. I was given more morphine to take at four hour intervals for the next week or so and more antibiotics for the infection on top of all the other courses I had yet to finish. When I got back to the hotel the only thing I wanted was to numb my mind to the memory of the physical pain I had just been through in emergency and knock myself out with weed. I don’t know how it works in regard to mixing regular drugs with fentanyl, but either the mixture of everything inside me wasn’t good or I smoked too much, when I got back to my room I collapsed three times.

The next few days were much the same, unable to move, excruciating pain, taking a taxi to the hospital to see someone in the emergency room. They eased up on the fentanyl and gave me codeine and laughing gas instead, because I was already on morphine and the gas was quicker to work and leave my system. But the pain was still as bad. They would not start until I got my breathing under control because I was hyperventilating, and when they did, I would inhale long and deep through the laughing gas. The doctor would pull the long strip of gauze out of the open wound in my vagina and stuff it with fresh gauze again. Then they would let me sit there with the laughing gas as long as I wanted, hours at a time, for the pain to subside enough for me to feel like I could move again. Back at the hotel, same as for the herpes I had to pour warm water over myself as I used the restroom, but the most horrific part was as I wiped, or as I moved around, or shifted in bed, or walked, I would feel a pull at the gauze hanging out of the wound and even with the morphine I felt like I was going to pass out from the pain.

After everything was cut and drained, the gauze was removed for the last time, and I had finished my three different courses of antibiotics and the round of antivirals. I thought I would finally start to feel better but the nausea and lack of appetite lingered. Two months after sleeping with Zach in New York, without going to work or the gym or even getting out of bed most days, I had lost around 20kg (or over 40lbs). I went to the doctor to find out why I still wasn’t getting better, she said at first the strep throat made me nauseous, but after that because of the sheer amount of medication I had been taking my microbiome would’ve been practically destroyed. She used the word ‘nuked’, my body had been nuked by antibiotics, and it would still take a long time for me to feel better. I had already been sick for a long time, a long time off work and a long time in bed. I applied for a wage reimbursement with my work insurance, surely all my medical bills and emergency room documentation would get me money for most of the time I took off. However, because I had tried my best to go to work a couple times, and you could only claim unbroken time off for a continuing illness, I was only reimbursed for a portion of one of the consecutive two weeks I wasn’t working. For two months off I was reimbursed $180, it was a complete waste of time to even apply.

What had I done to deserve this. I tried to reach out to friends, tried to go to the free counsellor at work, everyone told me I asked for this to happen. I knew how he was going to treat me, I was unsure all along and he had already stood me up the first time, what else was did I expect? I asked him to see me again, I asked him to spend time with me no matter how many times, in how many ways, he told me he had no interest in me. They told me that was how relationships between avoidant people and the anxiously attached, narcissists and those who are insecure, worked. But that didn’t feel right, I didn’t think I was ever insecure, I was only confused because he misled me and I never imagined any of this could happen. I truly expected things to go the way we discussed they would every time I got us to put everything on the table. He told me he wanted me too, for three years, how was this my fault? I told him exactly what I wanted and he took advantage of me and discarded me, how was that my fault? I asked him to sleep with me, but I never asked to do it with me when I didn’t want it, I never asked for multiple incurable sexually transmitted diseases, how was that my fault? Being rejected is fine, but I was hurt, I didn’t ask to be hurt.

Sad Day

The next few days were much the same, unable to move, excruciating pain, taking a taxi to and from the hospital to get the gauze changed. Zach had been watching everything I had been going through, and watching me bad mouth how he had fucked me over, on my close friends on Instagram. I also told him everything I was going through, there was no denying he gave me herpes with everything else he gave me, and I wanted him to know what his carelessness put me through. I told him about how what happened to me could mean I would need to get my Bartholin gland removed and I could never be naturally wet for a partner again. How I would need to tell everyone I wanted to sleep with for the rest of my life that I had herpes. I also asked him for his STD test result again and told him I could give him mine if he wanted them now because I had got everything back. He said he had just planned to get tested on his own and hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I was extremely upset at that, if he had something like gonorrhoea and exposed me to it he might not even test positive for it anymore. I told him I already asked him to get tested and he said he would. He said he hadn’t had the time or money to get tested, I guessed he had kept that from me hoping everything would blow over, but now he would go see a doctor. I needed it a month ago, why didn’t he understand it was almost too late? Why didn’t he understand that it looked like he had something to hide? Or did he actually have something to hide.

I used the STD test as an excuse to harass him, by the time I went back to work it was all I could think about. The pain and confusion when he told me the three years we were talking was bullshit, the emotional pain of the days we spent together in New York, the enduring physical pain of the months of illness after. The state of my dramatically physically changed body, a body that would never be the same. I couldn’t get past it and cleaning rooms alone in the hotel I would just have moments of overwhelming emotion that would almost make me collapse into tears on the spot. I went from being misunderstood in the department, to very well thought of and well-liked by the managers cause I worked hard, to not being able to complete a day's work for the emotional anguish I couldn't keep inside. I needed Zach to tell me that this wasn’t all a joke, there had to have been something else. I needed him to tell me I wasn’t that stupid that I went to New York to be used for sex. He must have had some other intention with me before I got nervous and angry and I made him pull away. I needed him to tell me that there was some other reason I got all these debilitating STDs from him, he had to have been stupid and immature and was thoughtlessly sleeping around to give me bacterial vaginosis, and it was a mistake he regretted. No one else knew what they were talking about, we were the only people in this, I needed him to tell me this wasn’t my fault.

He wouldn’t talk to me, he told me to leave him alone and accept that he didn’t want me, he told me I was a complete dumbass for thinking he could’ve given me herpes because that's not how herpes worked. He accused me in turn of trying to hide something, or knowing something, because how did I know so much about herpes if I had never had it before? I told him that was a ridiculous thing to say, I knew what AIDs was but that didn’t mean I had it. How could he still deny he gave me herpes with everything else he gave me too? He came up with some story about him telling me he had a cold sore, and I had said to him I didn’t care and told him to go down on me anyway, he said he probably still shouldn’t have done it but it happened and what's done is done. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I asked him why we didn’t remember it the same way? Why he didn't remember me asking him if he was serious about not wanting to kiss me? He told me I was lying. I didn’t even consider he was gaslighting me, really truly gaslighting me with a completely false version of events. I just kept saying I’m sorry, I’m not blaming you for the herpes, I’m just trying to understand what happened to me and I don't understand why we don't remember it the same. He told me to leave him alone. Dan had told me to consider suing him for the herpes, that had to be why he was doing this, why no matter what I said he wouldn’t say sorry. Not because he wasn’t sorry, but because I could use it against him in court if I wanted that. I’d never do that, but he doesn’t know that right, and I’m so upset with him. He does want to say sorry but he can’t. It’s me, if I was kinder, he would say sorry.

For weeks I asked him to please tell me the real reason he did this to me, I said I didn’t understand what happened, I said I didn’t want things to end this way. It was too cruel, too painful, I thought we were friends. He said we were friends, we could still be friends, we could even see each other in May, but he didn’t have anything else to say to me. I wish I had blocked him then too, but I had to understand how he could’ve used me for so long, five years pretending to be my friend, three years pretending he liked me. I felt like he got nothing out of it, for literal years there was no real contact, no sex, what did he want from me for all that time if none of what he said to me was real? I told him how disappointed I was, he said, “I’m sorry I was such a disappointment”, indignantly. How could he still not see how deeply he betrayed my trust, how could he still dismiss my feeling as an attack on him rather than a reaction to what he did to me. I kept on for almost two months, constantly questioning him, constantly trying to get a different answer. Nothing would satisfy me, and how could it? How could there ever be an explanation for what he put me through, how little he cared about me, how inconsequential the affects of the things he said and did to me were for him. I dove into a mania trying to find some way for him to admit to me, “Yes I used you, yes I did it for years, yes all you were good for to me was the ego boost I got from manipulating you to share pictures and videos of your body. It was only the final powerful moment I felt by convincing you to buy plane tickets, and a concert ticket for me, that I finally felt satisfied. When you were a week out from coming to New York, I first thought I might have gone too far. Only seeing you in person did I realise the reality of what I had done and by that time I thought I might as well try and take anything else I could from you physically”. I wanted him to tell me that truth, even if it was harsh. I don't know why I thought he was capable of that after three years of lies, three years of hiding he was pursuing me while he was in a relationship. I knew I was never going to get it but I just needed something real from him so badly, one truth after what turned out to be five years of lies. Some admittance from him that these weren’t just “mistakes” he made, they were choices that had an affect on me. I needed him to tell me that I didn’t have to take all the blame because my feelings were genuine and his weren’t, but to him I should never have felt anything in the first place.

I got worse, I kept telling myself, well, there is nothing I could say now that could make me look more pathetic. Nothing I can say now that would make me look more idiotic for having believed anything he said, I might as well just fly off the handle with every little thought that crosses my mind. The thing was, he had been telling me since New Zealand that he didn’t love me, but it felt so stupid then. A offhand comment of someone who thinks too highly of themselves in your life, that you shrug off for its ridiculousness. Now it was like, I’m not asking you to prove you love me, I’m pleading with you to show me in any way at all that you thought I was deserving of humanity. I was so hurt and humiliated and blamed. I needed anything, anything at all from him, to reaffirm my worth and show me that, even in some small way, I had given my body and my depth of feeling to someone who respected me. I asked if we were friends, but he said he didn’t want to talk to me for a while. I asked if he would ever change his mind about trying again with me, but he said he had nothing to say to me. I asked him if this was all about his girlfriend, would he get over her one day and think of me as a person on my own, but he ignored me. I begged him to see me one more time, when I wasn’t depressed about my dog and my living situation in Canada and my New Years eve and my birthday and the money and time I wasted. I asked him if he would want me if I wasn’t sick and I didn’t have strep throat and a Bartholin gland abscess that kept me giving him head and getting wet for him. If I tried harder and was happier and made more of an effort to be myself around him, if I hid how much he hurt me, would he try with me again? If he only ever wanted to use my body, could I tempt him with my body to prove my worth in person. He said no. I asked him to block me, because I didn’t have feelings for him but I just couldn’t let go of the hope for something different, some way to rewrite everything that happened between us, and I didn’t know why. Maybe some small part of me loved him, in the ways I love my friends, and I didn’t want to believe a person I loved was capable of doing what he did to me. I wanted him to reach out in the silly ways that I was reaching out to fix it, to seek my forgiveness for his cruelty. He blocked me on everything without another word.

I tried to reach out to my friends again, Momina and Dan, and they told me that it was good of him that he blocked me because he could’ve kept taking advantage of me if he chose not to. I thought they were right, I knew what I was doing when I was harassing him and it wasn’t like anything I said would make for a productive conversation, he was never going to say sorry to me anyway. I don't know why I spent so much time begging Zach to show me some kind of empathy for what I went through, I knew I was never going to get it. He had just weaved his way into my core over years, and broken me from the inside. He told me I was insecure, and I didn’t know what I wanted, and I couldn’t make up my mind so many god damn times, that it became a truth in how I acted (even if I knew that wasn’t how I felt in my heart). When the reality he was actively hiding that he was hot and cold and confusing because he was “pursuing” me while in a relationship, from his own mouth he never really wanted me for all those years he led me on, and as insane and self alleviating of the blame as it is to dictate such a thing considering he let me fly to New York for him twice, he thought I never should’ve wanted him either. How did it make him a good guy in the end because I was holding on and he cut me off. Didn’t they understand that this wasn’t me? That they’ve never seen me act like this before? Didn’t they understand that he had driven me to this point over months of hurt and confusion, over what turned out to be years of lies and manipulation of my emotions? Of course he stopped taking advantage of me, he got what he wanted, used my body, drained every little bit of hope out of me, and I wasn’t worth the headache anymore. He was never my friend, after how he was in person I don’t think he was ever attracted to me, he only used and abused my time and emotions for his ego. He never liked me, he said that in so many ways, as much as I tried and continue to try, I couldn’t deny that anyone, what else was there to take advantage of.

The rest of my time in Canada I was a like a ghost, I was just so broken and sad and riddled with self blame that I couldn’t function. There was one day I managed to go to the Squamish/Lil'wat cultural centre across the road, which I found really healing, any connection to Indigenous being makes me feel healed. I had been meaning to go with Claudia the entire time we lived there, but as I was walking, I decided not to even ask, and when I gave up on that I basically gave up on having a relationship with anyone in Whistler. I even drifted apart from Bronte and Jas by the end, especially after finally being moved up to staff housing without them. I had no interest in participating in life in Whistler at all. My new roommates were so nice too, they really tried to pull me into their friend group and make me feel welcome, but nothing could cheer me up or make me feel like my life in Canada wasn’t one long painful mistake. I felt like I didn’t want to exist anymore.

Up at staff housing even when I felt physically recovered from the STDs and medications, and I started eating again, I would call off work because I couldn’t face the day. Often, I wouldn't even get out of bed, just lay on the top bunk facing the wall for hours. I would watch the sunlight on the wall turn from morning grey, to blue in the mid day, to warm yellow in the afternoon, to navy in the night without moving. It got to the point where I was going into the doctor's offices again just to bed them to put me on antidepressants, but they would tell me that this was just a low point and to wait for things to get better. I decided to see someone regularly about the depression because I just couldn’t live like this any longer and I started speaking to a therapist in Creekside, which was the next town over. Once a week I would take the bus through the trees as the weather changed from snow, to rain, to a cool sunny breeze to see her. Because I finally knew I would go back to Australia after my work contract ended in May, and paying back that $1600 bonus was done, my therapist had been encouraging me to make the most of the time I had left. Going home was weeks away and she said there was no reason to sit around without using that time to make a memory that was worth this trip, even if it was just getting coffee with a friend. It was really difficult, probably one of the most difficult things I've ever forced myself to do, but I stopped myself from calling in sick to work. I didn’t want to spend time with my co-workers, I may have been out of the hotel but I still lived with them. Instead, I joined the craft club at the library for something a little social. I also started going to the gym in my building again and making plans for travelling home. Not just going back to Melbourne, but hopefully New York again for the Met exhibition on the way, and Texas and Wellington to see my friends and my brother, before going home to live with my dad again.

Everything about Zach almost hurt even more when Dan and Bosra, a girl I knew in Fort Worth, became the ones to offer so much emotional support to me. I wasn’t as close to them, especially Bosra I hardly even knew, and they freely gave me the shoulder to cry on that I couldn’t pry from Zach with bloody fingers after talking almost weekly for years and supposedly being friends for five years. Bosra told me I had a room in Texas if I ever needed the time away, and although I couldn't get off work just for that, we decided to go to the Megan Thee Stallion concert together with another girl we knew, Amanda, in Houston in June. She promised me we would make this a big blow out for my last days in the US, one happy memory to take home with me. After that I got outside regularly, most days just to walk around the village, but sometimes spending three hours walking all the way to Creekside just to catch the bus back home. Then I found a basketball hoop at staff, and there was always a random ball laying around, so I spent most of my days shooting free throws for hours. When I first picked up the ball it was like this epiphany moment that being in Canada was probably the longest time in my life I hadn’t held a basketball in my hands. Now that I had a kitchen and fridge at staff I started cooking for myself again too, making all the things I had eaten my whole life that I never got a chance to have whole in Canada. I think I spent two weeks making Papua New Guinean chicken pot and coconut rice every other day, which my therapist said wasn’t necessarily the best idea, but at least I started putting weight on again since the antibiotics. It started to make sense how much I’d lost my way, how on top of the disappointment of my life in Canada and the grief of losing my dog and the confusion of everything around New York, living in the hotel I had lost every little daily ritual that made me, me.

Hiding Tonight

All things come to an end, and my time in Canada came to an end in the most unexpected way. I had been telling Tim I was going to go back to New York, I had planned almost everything with Bosra and Amanda for Megan in Houston. We were going to have an international Papuan girl link up for the concert, but fortunes turned again. My mum had been very sick before I left for Canada, but we all thought she was getting better and she had been working with a social worker to get on disability support so she would always have someone to check in and care for her. I just never imagined there was something she was hiding from us. When I was really depressed, unable to get out of bed, I spent a lot of time on the phone with my family. I would spend hours on the phone with my mum, call my brother every day, and on my lowest of low days my dad had even taken off work just to spend twelve hours on the phone with me because I couldn’t face the day alone. Then suddenly, my mum would be slow to answer my calls and only stayed on the phone for a short time. She preferred to voice call instead of video call and when I did see her, she looked like a skeleton. A couple times I called she would even slur her words and in the middle of the day just tell me she was going back to bed. These were all things that were completely unrecognisable to me. If I wanted, I could call my mum at three in the morning and she would not only answer the phone, but she would yap for hours without me saying a word. She was not herself.

Alarm bells started ringing for me when I called my dad one day and he offhandedly mentioned she hadn’t called him that morning. As my brothers and I got older, and our tempers shortened with her, she began to call less and less (as in she went from calling me five times in a row to just twice), but she would still call me almost every day and Michael every week. And no matter how many times he told her to leave him alone, how many times he ignored her constantly blowing up his phone, since her operation she called my dad every single day. If she hadn’t called him something was wrong. I called Michael, he hadn’t heard from her in a while. I called Kobe, he hadn’t heard from her either. They told me not to worry but this wasn’t normal. I called my dad again, someone needed to get in contact with her. She only answered for Michael as I knew she would, but he said she was basically incoherent on the phone. I asked him when did he ever know her to be incoherent with him? When had she ever not dropped everything to speak to him? He said even when he called her with my niece earlier that week, she didn’t feel like talking. Ignoring my calls was fine, she never liked me, but Michael? Her princess bubu? He asked me if I thought we needed to send an ambulance to the house, I said yes, and we saved her life that day.

My mum was put into the ICU with HHS, hyperosmolar hyperglycaemic syndrome, a condition of her untreated type 2 diabetes. A diagnosis she had hidden from everyone, including the doctor and nurses who had performed her last surgeries the year before. I needed to get home to her, it’s a silly comparison of the attachments of a child, but if something happened, I wasn’t going to leave her like I left my dog. My dad left work immediately when it happened, and when he saw her in hospital, he was trying to convince Kobe and I that she was okay and we didn’t have to leave Canada and New Zealand, but she was mindless. My dad still wouldn’t help me financially to come home, so I did the only thing I could think of, I started a GoFundMe. At first, partly because of the work contract and the face I didn’t have money for flights let alone a spare $1600 to pay the hotel back, I was trying to raise money to go home and see her then come back for my last months in Canada. But it was still too expensive and I decided to just leave permanently. No one was more generous with their money, and time, than Dan and Bosra and I’ll hold them in my hearts forever for what they did for me. Dan sent me so much money in his GoFundMe donation that I even felt the need to give some back, a true friend and a good person. I told my dad that I had to wait a week for the money to clear but I would be coming home and I already quit my job. Because of the family emergency the hotel gave me a pass on the $1600 debt and told me I could leave before the end of my contract. That was when my dad finally had a “change of heart” and paid for my flights home, as long as I was going to pay him back. All that time I had spent begging him to pay for me to go to the emergency room, he always had the capacity, he was just making me do it myself. My mum was in the ICU and the doctors were telling me things like “if we are in a situation where she needs CPR we wouldn’t perform it because she wouldn’t survive “and he was still trying to make me do it myself. I understand standing on your own feet but I would’ve paid him back for all the money, of course I did give him all the GoFundMe money. It was beyond tough love, I’ll never forgive him for that.

With my plane tickets home, and my bags packed, it was just a couple days of stressful waiting. My brother took the week off work to be with my mother at the hospital in our hometown and I spent every day on the phone with them, speaking to the doctor on behalf of her. I was the one who had seen her through everything before, I was the only one who knew the details about her medical history, and lucky I did because I was the only one who could advocate for her in the state she was in. All the more reason I needed to get home. I was just destroyed, I went back to spending everyday crying, and my roommates did their best to take care of me regardless of the fact that I hadn’t really been interested in getting to know them. They ordered me flowers and chocolate from DoorDash and brought them to me in a vase to wish me well and hope my mum got better. It was the nicest thing someone in Whistler had done for me and couldn’t help but to start cry while I thanked them. I said a heartfelt goodbye when my bags were packed and as I was about to leave, left all my remaining weed for them to keep. I got a taxi to the village to get the bus to Vancouver airport. I never cried so much, except maybe when my dog died. I mean I had spent practically my whole time in the US and Canada crying, but when I left Whistler it was like a constant steady running tap from my eyes. I hated Whistler, but it was the heartbreaking end of the really important dream to me. Even if I wasn’t sniffling or getting choked up, the water of my tears still poured down my cheeks the entire way home. From Whistler to Vancouver, Vancouver to Auckland, Auckland back to Melbourne. I only stopped when I saw my Dad at arrivals at Melbourne Airport. Almost 24 hours in transit at that point and we got on the road in Tullamarine and drove directly to Bendigo hospital to see my mum.

She couldn’t see me, could hardly recognise me, but I was happy to see her sitting up. The thing is, my mum is very difficult and people don't really understand her, but I do so although the things she said to me hurt after I had done some much to see her, I always find a way to let it go. I had come directly from rural British Columbia, Canada to her in rural Victoria, Australia, and all she did was call me a witch for forgetting to bring her slippers. She yelled at me, she called me evil, she said I was only there to make her worse and sicker. I called my dad, he had gone to her house to clean up after she was rushed to hospital, and I asked him to bring me her slippers because she was yelling at me. Be told me to take care of it because he had more important things to do, e told me to walk to the store to buy another pair. I tried to tell him the nearest place was a 30 minute walk each way, but he didn’t care, he said it was good for me. There was no point in me sitting there while my mum yelled at me in front of the nurses, so I did as he said, I walked to Target, bought slippers and walked back. When I got to ICU and sat with her to finally check in and chat nicely, my dad turned up with her slippers from the house anyway and said I had been there for an hour and it was time to go back to Melbourne. I told him I wasn’t there for an hour, I had gone to the store like he told me to, I hadn’t even had the chance to talk to her. He did that to me all the time, to all of us, refuses help to make you stress and flail and then comes in at the end expecting you to be grateful for him. He had driven me all this way, he had cleaned my mum's house, he brought her slippers, now let's go. I told him no and spent an hour with my mum, I had come directly from Canada, he was not going to tell me what to do. When we got back in the car to head home, I told him I couldn’t believe him, I couldn’t believe he had done that to me after I had come all that way to see my mum in the ICU. He said sorry, but he was more angry than at me for being angry at him.

My parents didn’t care at all about what I had been through, didn’t care at all that I was depressed, if anything they were confused why I still thought about everything that happened overseas since I was finally home. I started realising how much they had guilted me for leaving them, how much they had let me blame myself for the things they were going though back in Melbourne and it made me resent them, and myself. Nothing went well for me, nothing, I didn’t even get the last hurrah I had spoken about with my therapist and planned in Texas. But of course they were happy I was back, even if it meant the death of a dream for me. After my mum was discharged from hospital, and she was living with me as I became her full time carer again, lying in the spare room on a matress on the floor while she took my old room and bed, I thought, why is this my life? I had tried so hard, for years, saving and planning and building excitement for this life I wanted as long as I could remember, and here back to splitting bills in my dads rental. I looked for another therapist, a psychologist this time, and finally got on antidepressants. No matter how bad things felt, I couldn’t let myself get as dark as I was after I got sick in Whistler.

That's the thing that stands out the most through all the things I endured, all the things I put myself through, the heartbreaks and disappointments and confusion in Canada. I remember I didn’t want to go out with Claudia and her friends one of our first weeks in the hotel and she told me, because she already knew I didn’t like Whistler, that I was giving up before I started. But I never gave up, to a fault I never gave up. I tried and tried and tried. I readjusted, I accepted my wrongs, I tried to make them right. I constantly made new plans, I made effort after effort at my job, I reached out to Claudia after it was obvious she didn’t want me in her life anymore, I reached out to Zach even though he felt the same. I made every effort to make things better and more exciting and more interesting even though I failed again and again and again. Even though in a lot of ways they were exactly the wrong decision, I wasn’t going to leave anything unsaid and regret it. Even though it wasn’t the right thing to do when it came to harassing Zach, I wasn’t going to give up too quickly like I did with Momina in Paris. This was my dream, moving overseas to start a new life was the only thing I ever wanted since childhood, and I did everything in my power to make it work. Maybe I should be embarrassed none of it worked, to take the lessons I learned in quiet shame, that's definitely how I felt for a long while. But I don't think there is any shame in making mistakes, in trying my best even if it didn’t go my way, and I hope my heart and intention shine through to the people who know and appreciate me. Everything that happened in Canada was the most painful, most confusing and humiliating, six months of my life. I wanted it so bad, it just wasn’t meant to be and I couldn’t let it go, but I think that’s okay now.

For so long, I found it so hard to live with myself knowing all the painfully wrong decisions I made in Canada, and in a lot of ways I still do. When I got back from Ireland five years ago a therapist told me maybe this didn’t go the way I planned, but there was still a lesson to learn from it, and that one day I would see it as a positive. I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say, there is no lesson to be learned in sexual assault, some things are just bad, some things just hurt, and I still feel that way. That's how I feel about Canada in a lot of ways too, it's definitely how I feel about Zach, there was no good lesson that came out of that that I feel I couldn’t have learned without the damage that being with him did to my body. But maybe there were important things to learn about myself. I learnt how deeply important it was for me to leave Australia, how important it was for that place to probably be New York or the US, and how I needed to commit myself to working just as hard again to make that happen. I learnt how important it was to trust my distrust, my intuition, and make decisions that are self serving sometimes and that doesn’t have to mean I’m being selfish. I learnt there is nothing virtuous in being endlessly forgiving, some people don't want your forgiveness, some people don't care about you, some people want to hurt you. I learnt how family is not always a positive force in your life and one day I hope I’m brave enough to build a life that doesn’t have my parents in it. These may sound like the musing of a hardened cold heart, and I do feel like that sometimes, that I lost a huge part of my personality to pain. But I only want to share the best parts of myself, my hopes and my body and my emotions, with people who I know will care for them and I don't think that’s bad. I feel less free, less open, less like myself, but I hope it’s a transitory thing. A transition from a girl who endured years of narcissistic emotional manipulation and months of loss, to a person who no longer blames herself for freely giving love to the people important to her, or feels regret for sincerely trying her best. Sometimes you just have to hold your dreams in your heart, take things one day at a time, and walk slowly to reach the place you are meant to be.

Dedicated to my Holly girl.

I’m so lucky I had you my angel, every memory I keep of you is bright and warm and pure, I’m the luckiest girl in the world that I got to share my childhood with such a beautiful creature. You brought me years of happiness and I get to keep that with me for the rest of my life. If soulmates are real, you will always be mine. My lolly bolly baby, my bob, I love you forever.