Souvenir

I was watching a tv show where two people, the kind you know will end up together, were playing carnival games at Coney Island. As the falling-in-love montage played out, I got pulled into a memory: a year ago, we were at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

It was a summer afternoon in late July and the closer we got to the beach, the saltier the air tasted. We found the perfect parking spot next to a car that looked like a hearse.

I remember your warm hand guiding me through the crowd, a buoy in the swell of human movement mimicking the ebb and flow of the ocean.

At one point, you probably teased me for calling ‘corndogs’ pluto pups. I liked insisting Americans had it all backwards, just as you were made to drive on the wrong side of the road. That was a debate I loved having.

Laughter tethered us to each other, even as the world around us felt uncertain. I grew to love the sound of your laugh tangled with mine, impossible to tell where yours ended and mine began.

I can picture you looking off into the distance with a furrowed brow, my fingers anxiously caressing the embossed golden souvenir coin in my hand. We had fallen in love, and I wonder if it scared you. I was frightened too.

I remember the first day I arrived, watching the curvature of Country transform as I travelled away from my home and landed in yours. I remember being too anxious to eat. Several moments were spent lying on your bed, letting my breath find a calm rhythm again.

Perhaps my body hadn’t arrived yet, stuck somewhere between moody Sydney winter and dry Los Angeles heat. Perhaps this was what happened when both fear and desire turned to face each other.

Love hadn’t always felt safe for me, as someone who grew up in dysfunction — where love and danger were so intimately bound together. To fly across the world was a big undertaking for the part of me that knew only how to run.

I had to rewrite the story I was telling myself. I had to confront my patterns, no more looking away. I had to examine the story that was passed down to me: that love is suffering. I didn’t want to be guarded anymore. I didn’t want to keep looking for the door. I know you didn’t either. We worked hard to let each other in, to soften the boundaries protecting our hearts.

When you come from lineages touched by the wounds of invasion, rupture is woven into the generational fabric. Sometimes we forget this: we carry the weight of our histories, and have to learn how to hold them in relation to each other. It’s a dance we enter into without knowing all the steps.

In different bodies, we shared parallel legacies of hurt. Different lands, different names for grief, but a similar ache passed down. We tried to reach for each other with vulnerability and care, even in the face of all we carried.

I wrote you a poem once that said it felt like our ancestors were leaning toward each other — some divine choreography we couldn’t fully see. Maybe that’s why it always felt bigger than us.

You asked if I wanted to stay and play more games, I declined. I didn’t want to play games, I just wanted to be with you. It didn’t matter where.

The little coin is oxidising now, worn by my nervous fingers and Australian air. It sits by my bedside still.

Unlike the unfortunate fate of so many couples in happy amusement park montages, we didn’t destroy each other. Yet in the infinite future which holds all possibilities, I imagine that could have happened. Sometimes I wonder if this is better. Sometimes I wonder if this is worse.

Maybe it’s only human to wish things had gone differently. I wanted to grow with you. I wanted to love you in a way that my parents, and their parents, couldn’t love each other. I wanted our love to be healing, to flow backward and forward across time and countries and bloodlines. I wanted to write a new story with you.

Amidst all of that, I accept the story that I am living in now.

Love is the container where a relationship takes shape, but they are not the same thing. I suppose that’s why, when a relationship ends, there’s still a river of feeling to wade through.

Love is subject to the same forces of time that turn shells into sand and shift tectonic plates. There is no way of knowing when it will end.

I must hold this ache. I want to witness it fully. I want to feel it.

I want to mourn, to sit with the body of this love until I register its absence, to cry at its funeral.

To feel the weight of grief is to honour the gifts this love gave to me.

I will always think us brave to have taken a leap into the unknown. I know I would have always wondered if we hadn’t. I don’t think our ancestors would have had it any other way.

The worn souvenir coin on my bedside table is proof that we tried, and proof that we moved toward each other, across oceans and fears.

A love that travelled great distances.

A love that left a mark.