Proceeding With Caution

Some relationships just feel temporary, they come with a "Best if sold by..." date. In relationships like those, you start thinking things like "when we break up, I am totally stealing that DVD" and "the next person I date won't inhale his food like he's afraid it's gonna run off the plate." I like to believe I've denounced my title as the Summer Fling Queen but the only reason I acquired such a title is because I am unable to tell the difference between the temporary and the permanent. I have problems with depth perception. I was once so enthralled in a summer fling that I got engaged to the poor guy and, needless to say, it proved to be of a semi-permanent nature and I grew up enough to realise I was too young for the commitment.


But this thing that I'm in now, this relationship, if you will, doesn't feel that way. There is, however, an approaching deadline. My Australian visa expires in mid-March and then it's back to the good ol' U.S. of A. for this Californian. In the meantime, I feel myself growing attached. He's showing me that I can trust the opposite sex again. He believes our relationship can be beneficial to my healing and says that wherever our relationship and my coping overlap, he wants to provide extra support and care in those places. How can I not feel myself growing close to him while he's stitching up my torn heart with such respect and thoughtfulness?


"We're like a carton of milk, our relationship is. And we're trying to drink every drop before it spoils," I told him once. He laughed at my musings and agreed, calling me insightful.




"So you're definitely going to break up once you leave?" a workmate asked me. We were talking about our beaus whilst standing in the sunlit beer garden at the pub where I'm employed, stacking dirty pint glasses in metal racks to be washed and polished.

I wedged the last glass into the rack and sighed, "Yeah, well, I guess we'd have to, huh?"

"You don't have to do anything," she asserted and I thought: Isn't that just like a 20-something?

To live day-to-day, moment to moment, with a subconscious disregard to the future, is the essence of youth. Sometimes, however, I am a very elderly twenty-three year old and find myself tip-toeing through this relationship out of fear of the inevitable trip to the international airport. I've got a little more than five months to get caught up in this romance and I plan on being very efficient with my time.

What happens if I love him? If we love each other? What then? Well, what wouldn't I do for love?

A long-distance relationship is one thing, an inter-continental relationship is something else and neither of the two have reliable track records. And who knows how long this will even last? The mid-twenties is a state of flux and though we crave each other now, those feelings may grow cold by the end of summer as emotions often do. Well, if that were the case, then I suppose my departure would come just in time. But what if the exact opposite happens and we become a unit, an "Us" and a "We"? Then at least things would end on a positive note and if he were ever in the States, he could definitely look me up.