It was only a fling—so why did it haunt me for half a decade?
On a fleeting romance, its lasting impact—and the quiet grief of unrequited love...
Today’s post was a rather difficult one to write. Once the pain, the hurt, and the humiliation of moving across the world for a man I barely knew had subsided—and it did, many, many years ago—it became easy to package the experience as a dinner-party tale. After all, it takes a particular blend of hubris, hope, and reckless romanticism to move continents for someone you’d spent just six days with.
But this post isn’t about that. It’s about what came after—the part that’s rarely told. Because while for him, our time together was nothing more than a fleeting holiday fling, for me, it became something that haunted me for over half a decade.
This took a little over two days to write. I drafted some of it at a Greek wine bar on Store Street, not far from where I’m staying, with a much-needed glass of red in hand. I wrote and re-wrote, read and re-read, until I couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice anymore. Eventually, I sent it to a friend (because I’m nothing if not needy for instant gratification), who said that what happened was an absolute classic of unrequited passion—the longing, the falling hard, and then suffering the long-drawn pain and complication of having made such a commitment without commitment in return.
I was surprised by how upsetting it was to rehash the memories—not of the initial heartbreak, but of the five years spent caught between hope and knowing. It made me wonder: is rejection—and unrequited love—a more potent drug than heartbreak?
It took me almost six years to get over Ozzie—the man I had really only known for six days. Longer than my first love. Longer than my university boyfriend. Longer than my boyfriend Josh, even though I thought I was going to marry him.
Had I been a more sensible person, I would never have seen him again after the morning he drove away from me beneath a cold, colourless sky. It was six months after I’d moved to Sydney to be with him—though with him is perhaps too generous a phrase for someone who had always kept me at arm’s length.
The day he left for Vietnam, I went to the beach with two girlfriends who insisted I do some kind of ceremony to close the Ozzie chapter: to leave him firmly in the past. There was a letter, and a lighter, with which I set fire to it.
I’m not usually one for that kind of woo-woo sincerity, but I had met these friends during yoga teacher training, where everyone is slightly crazy and full of conviction. So there we were: a Thursday evening on the beach in Bondi, wispy clouds streaking across the pale sky, the sea flat and silvery. We weren’t the only ones doing some sort of ceremonial nonsense—further down the sand, a man in linen was doing what looked like sun salutations in slow motion, and then there was the hum of Brazilian drums further afield on the grassy knoll. And so I sat in the sand with the letter I had written Ozzie, and I cried, and then set fire to it—thinking, perhaps, this kind of idiotic behaviour might fundamentally change me after all.
But of course, that wasn’t the end of things. Not even close; not by a mile. And while I promised my girlfriends I’d blocked him on every platform, I didn’t—because three days later, in what I took to be a Very Clear Sign, two messages arrived on my phone within minutes of each other.