by David Burton
And that can be a scary and challenging place to be. It’s easy to be in denial, even in therapy. It’s easy to go in, figure out the game (CBT), and never be truly emotionally open.
I was a mess by the time I got back to Gary. I slowly began to unload some of my worries. I was uncomfortable, but I was now too drained to feel anything properly. The thoughts of darkness kept any emotion at bay. Happiness, anger, passion—they all felt like memories I had lost long ago.
Gary outlined a six-week plan.
I wish I could say I went to those sessions with Gary and really came to terms with who I was. I took the time to slowly unpack what was going on inside my own head and the reasons for my continually self-destructive behaviour.
But I couldn’t see past Dani. I was sad because I had lost a relationship. It was a relationship I hadn’t expected, with a gender I didn’t believe I was aroused by, and it left me bewildered. That much I was willing to admit. Gary helped me to work through those thoughts.
If I truly believed sexuality was fluid, and there was life beyond the straight/gay dichotomy, then what did it matter if I found a woman attractive? And wouldn’t my family and friends understand that?
‘You need to tell people what’s going on,’ Gary advised. ‘You need to get better at that. Tell someone.’
I told Amber. I told her I was going to see Gary and that I’d been confused and deeply sad for many months.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said.
Her lips grew tight and she took a few sharp breaths.
I told her about the washing up. About the tears. And about the thought of suicide. I posed it as a joke. ‘You won’t believe what I nearly did…’, as if it was a drunken night out. I laughed.
Amber didn’t think it was funny. In fact, she walked away into her bedroom and closed the door.
She was warm and friendly again by that afternoon, but we didn’t discuss it after that. She kept her older-sister eye on me, and I let her. Besides, things were starting to get better.
I kept talking to Dani. I rang her and we’d talk for hours.
‘How’s the new boyfriend?’ I’d ask.
Silence for a moment, before, ‘Good. Good.’
‘I’m glad. That’s really good.’
And then she’d come round and we’d find ourselves on the bed or the couch, just holding each other. It felt warm. It felt loving.
‘I shouldn’t be holding you like this,’ I said to her.
‘Why not?’
‘Your boyfriend.’
She got up and made a cup of tea. ‘You’re right.’
Within minutes she had collapsed into my arms again.
Our attempt at being ‘just friends’ seemed to be impossible. I was undeniably attracted to her. And she was attracted to me. I was secretly hoping she would break it off with the new man.
I needed advice.
‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked Amber.
Once again her lips tightened. ‘If you really think, really think, that Dani will make you happier and make life easier, then go for it. But you should really think about that. Because if it ends, however it ends, you don’t want to end up in the same place again.’
I asked Gary the same question.
‘Well, what do you think you should do?’ he asked in return.
Clever bastard.
It was my third or fourth session. I didn’t go back after that.
17
Gutless Wonder
‘Mum, Dad, I need to tell you something. It might make you mad, and perhaps you have a right to be. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I’m seeing someone. It’s a woman.’
There’s a second’s pause, and then laughter. From both of them. Mum rolls her eyes.
‘Whatever, Dave. Whatever you think.’
Dad seems slightly disappointed. ‘But you would’ve been proud of me Dave. I’ve been getting my head round it. The other day I saw this guy and I thought: Dave might like him.’
Once again the consequences of my confession had proven far less cataclysmic than I had imagined them to be. I had built up this conversation for days in my head, convinced that my parents would be furious for my seemingly unending confusion. Quite to the contrary, they weren’t upset at all.
My initial embarrassment about ‘coming in’ to my friends and family was soon overshadowed by my renewed affair with Dani.
‘Something’s got to give,’ I said to her. ‘We can’t keep on like this.’
‘Well what are we supposed to do? I still want to hang out with you, Dave.’
‘The only way that can happen, I think, is if you’re not seeing someone else. It’s not fair to him that you and I are spending so much time together.’
Within a few days, Dani had broken it off with her boyfriend.
There was no turning back now. We leapt into the full velocity of each other without hesitation. It was a giddy, dizzying fall.
Just like that, everything was fixed.
Weeks passed, each one feeling like a milestone. Dani had never had a relationship longer than a couple of months, so when we got to nine weeks it felt as though we had achieved something. A truly happy, committed relationship. I celebrated by doing my best to disappear inside Dani’s personality and make her every whim come true.
Dani made me incessantly happy. I uncovered positive emotions in myself that I had never encountered before. With Dani, life felt lighter. Her biggest criticism of me was only that I thought too much, and she did her best to shake me out of my own brain. It was a welcome shift. I fell in love with Dani’s relaxed and carefree lifestyle.
But I suspected I was in danger. Carefree? Relaxed? My idea of a long, serious, committed relationship didn’t fit that description. Anytime I brought up bigger talk of the future, Dani became very quiet. I sensed I was playing a delicate game. If I wasn’t careful, my over-analysing would push Dani away. In so many ways we were very unlike each other. So I set about changing myself to eliminate these differences so that we could have a long and happy partnership.
I attempted to embrace a hippy and carefree attitude. I wore fishermen’s pants and tie-dyed T-shirts. I attended parties with her and convinced myself that I was a secret extrovert. I did everything I could to quiet the part of my brain that wanted to know about the future and where this relationship would be going.
After all, the concept of losing Dani was too terrifying to contemplate. So why contemplate it? If I was smart and made her happy, there would be no need to ever consider a life without her.
I had ideas about how long-term relationships operated. These ideas were based on movies, mostly, and other successful relationships I had observed. They required devotion and commitment. They required compromise and change. So I once again became a different version of myself. I was Dani’s loveable boyfriend. I was so laid-back I was almost falling over.
Dani took to the notion of having a career with the force of a gentle breeze. Graduating from teaching, she moved on to do a certificate in dressmaking, before contemplating visual arts, and then nursing, all the while cafe-hopping a
s a waitress. I struggled with this casual approach to her professional life, but I began to take to my own job prospects with a certain amount of indifference, and I stopped myself from thinking about my career future.
We committed, career-wise, to drifting. That is, we committed to not committing.
Dani was very social and incredibly extroverted. She’d come home from a party energised, where I’d end up feeling drained. This strain of introversion was one I really struggled to shift, and it became our greatest point of tension. I did my best to join her and her friends for long nights of drinks, music and mad conversations, but it wore thin pretty quickly. Equally, for Dani, cosy nights in front of the television were about as invigorating as a visit to the local funeral home. We each tried to accommodate the other, mis-moulding our personalities in the process.
Dani did have one specific vision. One grand life goal. It was simple, but it was real. Buy a van, use it as a home, and travel around Australia.
It was a goal that I thought could keep us together. I came up with a plan.
In a few months, my lease on the house with Amber would be up. Dani and I would spend those months saving, then we’d purchase a van and take to the wide open road.
That was, literally, the entire plan. It was short on detail, but big on ideas. And we had done very little to fill in the detail when, a few months later, I put most of my belongings into storage and got into an old Toyota van that had previously housed a smelly, wind-swept hippie couple.
I ended the rental agreement with Amber. It all made perfect, beautiful sense to me at the time. Amber, like any good sister, remained mute. We wouldn’t live together again. Not renewing the lease was a decision I later regretted.
The van cost about five grand, and we split it 50–50. At the time, two and a half thousand dollars was all of my savings. Dani was working as a waitress, and I had been doing some marking work at the uni for Donna and making no money on the independent theatre scene in Brisbane. The day we bought the van felt like we were putting a stake in the ground. We were serious. There was no turning back. It was a major investment, quite literally, in a shared future.
Dani christened the van ‘The Gutless Wonder’ or ‘Gutsy’ for short, not taking on Amber’s suggested name ‘Urine’, after its uninspiring colour.
It was wild. There was endless possibility ahead of us.
‘I just wanted to make sure you didn’t want to take on another marking contract,’ Donna emailed a few days before I left.
No need! I had the open road! People fruit pick, don’t they? Don’t know how that works, but that’ll cover our fuel and food. No contract, thank you!
‘I just want you to be sure you’re not changing who you are to make someone else happy,’ Amber said quietly before we departed.
No! This is exactly who I am. Don’t you see? After all this time? I’m free now! I’m on the open road with the woman I love!
‘Have you got insurance? Has a mechanic looked it over?’ Mum asked me over the phone.
Ah, we can’t afford that. But I’m sure it will be fine. I know how to fix a flat tyre! It’s an adventure!
Convinced of success and with a thousand dollars between us we set out, heading west.
Day one. We were to meet a friend in St George, about six hours out of Brisbane. A day’s drive. An easy goal to reach on our first day.
We’re an hour from St George when we hear the noise. It’s a loud ‘pop’.
‘Was that us?’ Dani asks.
I do a thorough mechanical assessment of the situation by turning around in my seat and looking around the interior of the car, before briefly looking over the road in front of us.
‘I think we’re okay.’
Less than thirty seconds later, Dani is sounding quite alarmed: ‘The temperature gauge is going up. I think the engine’s overheating.’
She barely gets to the end of the sentence before smoke emerges from the front of the van, and we hear another loud pop from somewhere behind us.
I know enough about engines to understand that overheating is not a great thing. We pull over into the red dust at the side of the road.
I get out and lift up the passenger seat to find the curious mess of an engine that’s as hot as sin.
‘What do we do?’ Dani asks.
I shrug.
‘I guess we wait for it to cool down.’
It’s the middle of the afternoon. We’re an hour outside St George, which roughly translates as the middle of nowhere. A straight road leads into the distance ahead and behind us, and the quiet dry hum of empty bushland surrounds us.
I did my best to remember that we were having an adventure.
We wait for about an hour by the side of the road for the engine to cool. When we continue driving, we only go a couple of kilometres before the same thing happens. The engine is boiling. We pull over again, wait for a while, and then I carefully remove the radiator cap. We have a three-litre bottle of water in the back for just these sorts of occasions. (We were prepared, after all.) The van glugged down all three litres with furious thirst.
Right. That should solve the problem.
This time we made it another five kilometres before we had to pull over. We went through the same routine again, except this time we poured our bottles of drinking water into the radiator. The sun was now setting, and we’d given up all of our water.
After another couple of k’s we pulled over again. It had been two hours since we’d first stopped and we’d only travelled about ten kilometres.
I tried to assess the situation. ‘So we’re out of phone reception.’
‘Yep.’
‘Out of water.’
‘Yep.’
‘The sun is setting.’
‘Yep.’
‘And we can only move a few k at a time.’
‘Yep. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too dangerous to drive at all.’
We looked at each other blankly, hoping the other would be able to provide some answer. But one never came.
We had no other choice: we had to abandon the van. I stood by the side of the highway and stuck out my thumb. Over a period of twenty minutes, I almost got run down by two huge trucks, but at last a ute pulled into the dirt behind us. A tall middle-aged man with greying hair got out and made a quick assessment.
Our radiator, he kindly informed us, was busted, and without a tow we’d have to stop to refill the radiator every ten k or so to get Gutsy to St George. She was in desperate need of a mechanic.
So we got to St George ten k at a time, with the kind man following us the whole way. He was a local, and he knew the creeks. He’d run off into the bush to fill his water up and then fill up our radiator fresh each time we stopped. What should’ve been a one-hour drive took about five. When we finally got to St George and pulled into our friend’s place, the man waved goodbye and kept going.
I don’t know his name, and I’ve never seen him since.
Gutsy was dead. And our dreams with it.
The call from the mechanic came twenty-four hours later.
‘Are you sitting down
?’ he asked.
‘I am now,’ I said.
Across the room, Dani was looking at me, hopefully.
‘It’s dead mate. Radiator’s gone and the entire engine needs to be refitted. You’re looking at over five thousand to fix it, which is probably more than it’s worth.’
‘Yeah, okay.’
When I tell Dani the news, she cries. The mechanic tows Gutsy to our friend’s backyard. We need to make a plan to dump it or fix it. Either way, we catch a lift back to Brisbane. We’re homeless and poor.
We crashed at a friend’s place and spent the summer in poverty and crippling heat. We reluctantly went back to work. Dani’s crystalline dream was shattered, and our future was blank.
I struggled to keep up a sense of calm. I collapsed into anxiety. Dani nursed me through panic attacks as we couch-hopped from her sister’s to various friend’s. I had never been homeless before, and the lack of routine and stability left me out of my mind. It felt like we were drifting without an anchor. Similarly, Dani was staring down the barrel of several more months of hard hospitality work to restore her savings. I nursed her through tears and despair.
Meanwhile, Gutsy was still out at St George. But I had a mate. Or rather, a husband of a mate, who knew engines better than most, and he figured we could rebuild it. Ted was married to Donna, my lecturer at uni. I had remained in close contact with Donna and babysat for her regularly.
Ted accompanied me on what turned out to be an eighteen-hour-straight round trip to collect the van. We towed the sad thing right into Ted’s driveway in Brisbane. And Ted and I spent the summer rebuilding the engine from the inside out.
When I asked Dani if she wanted to come and help, she said she felt awkward and didn’t want to get in the way. I nodded that it was fine, but inside I was resentful. My desire to keep her happy won out, however, and I didn’t express my annoyance. But we stopped talking in any meaningful way. I suddenly resented everything I had given up and how much I had changed, and I could see that Dani felt guilty. We both spiralled into negativity. But I was determined to keep the relationship alive. I couldn’t afford to lose it. Not now, not after all this. Besides, I loved her. And, after all, wasn’t that all we needed?
