Love of another person is a funny thing. You give your feelings to that person and it does strange things to you. Even after the love wilts and dies it can still do strange things if you let it and even catch you unawares.

I consider myself lucky enough to have fallen head over heels in love twice, first with Suzi who although long broken up I still see on a regular basis and the other time with Barbara. While things with Suzi ended well and we are still friends even now long after, things with Barara didn’t end well. Very Badly is probably a better word for it.

On sober reflection really things with Barbara were doomed from the start. I had been semi set up with a girl whose name i can’t remember, only that she drove a VW Beetle. We went to a murder mystery night and we didn’t hit it off, but there were definite good vibes between her Cousin Barbara and I. We ended up spending the night together and were a couple for a futher nine months.

Things were never easy with Barbara, she lived in Melbourne and I lived in Hobart an hours flying away and it was difficult to see each other, especially since it was before the days of discount airfares and so we would spend if we were lucky two weekends together a month. The phone was our refuge and we would spend hours several times a week talking to each other. Distance when you are young and in love is never easy. In the end it was distance that killed the relationship.

Strangely I have never been able to remember the conversation of the night we broke up or why precisely, only that we did and that i ended up leaving her home around 11.45pm to go the airport. The final goodbye, hands slipping from each other and goodbye. I spent almost 24 hours until my flight at the airport since i didn’t have the money to be able to pay to change my flight and i remember sitting hoping she would walk up the concourse and things would be ok. But she didn’t, they weren’t. I did try and contact her a couple of times but she always refused contact.

For a while after Barbara I became a bit self destructive. Some people at times of great emotional upheaval turn to the bottle or drugs or what ever is their fancy. I turned to work strangely enough. I worked as much as i could both with my day job and every weekend and a night a week with the army, and studied a further three nights a week. I barely slept and when i did it wasn’t a comfortable sleep. In hindsight i am suprised that i managed to keep going like that for around eight weeks before I crashed having made myself quite ill and exhausted.

Getting sick I realised that i had to take better care of myself and so i slowed down somewhat. Gradually the pain over loosing Barbara dimmed and I got on with my life. I worked less and studied less but i’ve never been able to cope with stress so well afterwards. Once in a long while i might even have a small anxiety attack over something stressful or even something minor. I guess that is there to stay but they don’t worry me, my personality is too stubborn to give in to any anxiety attack.

Its a little over ten years now since all of that happened. Water under the bridge so to speak but once in a while i wonder what ever happened to her, is she still nursing?, did she find someone else? what colour did she paint her cupboards in the end? Little things and big things. When i lived in Melbourne i drove past her old home once but i didn’t slow down as some memories should remain in the past and besides it was just too weird. Know what I mean? At the time it would have been six years since the breakup.

So why am i talking about it now? Something happened that caught me unaware and was like a punch to the stomach, leaving me unable to breath properly, my chest feeling constricted and tight. One of my people had some work to be done that they wanted me to look through and so I turned over the page to find a note with a name, title, address and phone number relating to the query that they were dealing with. Her dads name and title but the address and phone number was her old address when I was seeing her and she lived with her parents. God knows how many times I would have dialled that number, many many times i am sure.

Its funny how a memory long past can hit you sometimes. I wonder what happened to you Barbara?

Tags: relationships, love, memories