As winter settles across Sydney a certain wistfulness invades the mind. A longing for other times, a sweet nostalgia both melancholy and pleasurable, like the takes of a biscuit recalled across the decades: a remembrance of things past. Things with me have improved lately. Not positive, but definitely not negative – Neutral I guess. Work is fine and am getting some leads. Luke n I – celebrated my birthday @ yellow in potts point. A few years ago we would have been painting the ville red – or at least a deeper shade of vomit. There would have been dancing and debauchery and the constant, relentless, unrealistic search for available women.
I mentioned my first girlfriend that night, a girl who left me for another man after she got caught, metaphorically, with her knickers down doing the dirty behind my back, but I don’t remember this, I remember first the curve of her waist and the smoothness of her flawless brown skin, the color of a nut, as I run my hand around to pull her close, and then this warmth is replaced as I am filled with regret (why, oh why, did I ever let her go?), and then comes a peace (ah…better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all). And like my memories of the past, I forget the rows and the infidelities on all sides and the splitting up and the long, slow death of the relationship like a moth being overcome in a jar of chloroform, and get all wistful. Well, not entirely false but rose-tinted through time’s lens because I never liked it that much then.
Like Swann in Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past, who takes a bite on a Madeleine biscuit and is sent on a seven – volume reverie as the taste and smell take him back to the events and the girl of many years before, we sit – us men who aren’t old and aren’t even middle – aged but also who aren’t young anymore – and we remember the girls who have come and gone and wonder at how age has mellowed us, has changed the way we want to celebrate, who aren’t involved with anyone, look back and ask ourselves, “Have we failed? Do we have regrets? Or is it all like a cycle – the good times come and go, that good women are seduced and abandoned, or abandon us and then we find ourselves sitting at a table remembering the feel of their skin and wondering when we will next know such love and whether when it arrives again, as it surely will, will we let it pass again or this time will we hold it and keep it? To try and pin the butterfly to a board this time, but by the very act of doing that, will we kill it once again?”
