One
Borderline Insane
If you’re looking for a tragic, traumatic backstory, I’m going to disappoint you, I’m afraid. I’m not that guy. I laugh easy, joke often, and pretty much see the joy in almost everything around me. I know, unbearable, right? Sorry.
I’ve been this way forever. Honest, I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t the “glass is half full” person in the room. When I was a kid most of my friends thought I was weird. Or fake. A lot of them tried their best to drag out the emo in me. To mess with me enough to see me snap or crumble. I found out when I was seventeen that my best mate had bet a hundred bucks he’d be able to make me lose my temper enough that I would get suspended from school for a week before we graduated.
He lost.
Can you see what I’m saying? I’m a nice guy. I’m not a prick. I’m not a jerk. I enjoy hanging out with the guys, have a few “friends with benefits” on a semi-regular rotation, take a lot of pride in being healthy and enjoy my job as the Sydney University’s gym manager and personal trainer. I’ve got a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science (Exercise and Sport Science) – those parentheses are important, as is the word Honors that goes with it – and six months left before I finish my Master’s in Exercise Physiology. I recently bought a betta fish that I call No Direction. I’ve got plans to open my own personal trainer business one day soon – Push It P/T – and spent a total of nine hours last week with a very helpful bank manager discussing loans, long-term business structures, future staff and, eventually, how I could help her lose the excess weight she’d been carrying since the birth of her twins eight months previously.
I can say with all truthfulness that I’ve only fallen in love twice. The last time I ended up on television and almost in jail after an American student, Maci Rowling became the target of the paparazzi due to the fact she was also involved with one of our local celebrities. (Just to fill you in, she didn’t choose me. She went with Raphael Jones. I still give her shit about that.)
The first time I fell in love . . .
Man, I don’t really want to talk about the first time. Of course, what we want and what we get isn’t always the same thing, right? Hell, I wanted the world to shake when I kissed Maci that time in my living room. I wanted her to say “Raph who?” when questioned by the media. That didn’t happen.
What did happen was I accepted we weren’t meant to be, put my “just friends” hat firmly in place and let it go. Got on with living.
That’s what it’s all about. Living. Enjoying every minute of every day we have. Not wasting it with second-guessing, regret, hoping in vain, wishful thinking or moping. Yeah, those things aren’t really in my vocabulary.
As I’ve said before, this attitude seems to irritate a lot of people, which I always find puzzling. Why would a happy person with no baggage piss someone off? Is it because I make them feel . . . less in some way? Less successful? Less complete? I don’t mean it to. Honest.
Life is about being in the moment. The present. And the present is pretty damn perfect. Except . . .
Okay, I can’t skirt around it any more. My brain keeps coming back to something I’d rather it didn’t. Actually, not something, but someone.
That “first” I mentioned earlier. The one that “got away”.
Yeah, that’s a lot of quotation marks there, isn’t it?
I just . . . I don’t . . .
Damn it, let’s start this again.
G’day. I’m Brendon Osmond. I’m a twenty-five-year-old post-graduate student at Sydney University. Most of my friends call me The Biceps, I suspect because I give Chris Hemsworth in Thor-mode a run for his money. I have big plans, big goals and a ridiculously positive outlook on life. Nothing fazes me. Nothing unsettles me.
Until the morning I woke to a text message from someone I didn’t expect to hear from again.
Someone. Okay, not just someone . . . that one. She of the quotation marks.
It was a simple text but one that shook me a little.
Thinking of you.
That’s it. Who sends a text like that after over two and a half years of no contact whatsoever? I mean, I followed this girl to the States, I opened my damn chest, took out my heart and gave it to her, and she gave it back. Told me we had no hope. And now she sends me this text? Without any follow-up? No text to let me know she’d sent that message to the wrong person. No apologies for the utterly random contact. No LOL Psyche! complete with a winking smiley face emoticon just to highlight the joke of it all.
Who does that?
Apparently Amanda Sinclair.
Amanda Sinclair, the American girl who made it clear we didn’t have a “relationship” because she “wasn’t for me”. Because she couldn’t “be what I wanted”. See? More of those damn quotation marks. I don’t think I’ve ever had the need to use quotation marks until Amanda Sinclair entered my life. Amanda Sinclair, the American college student I met almost three years ago during an amateur snowboarding competition down in Thredbo (that’s the main ski slopes in Australia, if you don’t know) and who I then proceeded to spend the rest of the comp in bed with.
We both lost our respective rounds, but we didn’t mind. Not at all. Holy fuck, did we . . . well, fuck. It was the most mind-blowing sex, the most intense, perfect, sublime sex I’ve ever had.
After the snowboarding competition finished, she followed me back to Sydney and crashed in my one-room apartment. We spent most of the days in bed. Most of the nights as well. We laughed a lot. She had the same approach to life I did: live it, don’t dwell on it, regret is just wasted energy, exist for the now. We occasionally went out, caught a movie or two. I once smuggled her into my Biomechanical Analysis of Movement lecture. We sat up the back of the lecture hall, where my professor – who wore glasses with the thickest lenses ever – couldn’t see us, and made out. And by make out, I mean Amanda went down on me while I was trying to take notes.
Six weeks after we first met, she realized she’d overstayed her visitor’s visa by a week. By that stage I was in love with her. That simple. I have no problems admitting that. If I’m going to spill it all, the whole sordid, woeful story, I may as well go the whole hog and leave nothing out. I was in love with her. And she was in love with me.
Of course, being in love doesn’t suddenly change geography. She was from the US and I was Australian. We both had studies to complete, families to think about. So she went back to the States the next day, back to San Diego where she was studying to be a high school English teacher at San Diego State University, and I stayed in Sydney. For three days.
Three days.
Long enough for me to finish my mid-semester thesis (Carb Depletion and its Impact on Muscle Regeneration), submit it to my professor, bring the assistant manager up to speed at the university gym, and buy a one-way plane ticket to San Diego.
One week later, I flew back to Australia. Alone.
The crib notes version of that week goes like this:
I arrive in San Diego.
Amanda collects me at the airport.
We spend five incredible days rarely leaving her dorm room.
I meet her family in the flesh three times.
I eat with them twice.