By
It took me almost six years to get over Ozzie. Longer than my first love. Longer than my university boyfriend. Longer, even, than Josh, the man I thought I was going to marry.
Had I been a more sensible person, I never would have seen Ozzie again after the morning he drove away from me beneath a cold, colorless sky. It was six months after I had moved to Sydney from London to be with him — though “with him” is perhaps too generous a phrase for someone who had long kept me at arm’s length.
We had met a year earlier on a ferry when I was on holiday in Australia and spent six lusty, lovely, otherworldly days together, at the end of which he said, before driving me to the airport, “If I asked you to marry me, would you stay?”
I boarded my flight, hysterical, already dreaming of my return, hoping we could pick up where we left off. But when I arrived six months later, I could tell that something had changed — the spell, for him, had broken.
Several months after that, he left for a trip to Vietnam, and I went to the beach with two girlfriends who insisted I do a ceremony to close the Ozzie chapter and leave him firmly in the past.
I’m not usually one for woo-woo sincerity, but I had met these friends during yoga teacher training, where everyone is slightly crazy and full of conviction. That Thursday evening on the beach in Bondi, I sat in the sand with a letter I had written to Ozzie, and I cried, and then set fire to it — thinking, perhaps, this kind of idiotic ritual might change me.
But of course, that wasn’t the end. Not even close. While I promised my girlfriends I would block him on every platform, I didn’t — because three days later, in what I took to be a clear sign, two messages arrived on my phone within minutes of each other. One was from Ozzie, saying he was at a guesthouse in Vietnam and had seen someone who looked just like me. Was it one of my sisters? And the other message, nearly simultaneous, was from my sister: Was Ozzie in Vietnam? Because someone who looked exactly like him just turned up at her guesthouse.
I chewed endlessly over this sign, because surely it meant something. Surely, it couldn’t have just been a coincidence. I turned it over with myself and anyone who would listen, desperate to decode its meaning. But, in time — after five years of signs — I would come to realize they meant nothing at all.
Then I met Josh. We spent three-and-a-half years very much in love, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that maybe Ozzie was the one who got away.
A friend of mine took me to task over my behavior when I told her I had met up with Ozzie a few times, platonically, during my later years with Josh. It had started innocently enough. I did the coastal walk each morning before yoga, and Ozzie would drive past me on his way to work. One morning, he pulled over and asked if I wanted to grab a coffee.
Coffee felt safe. But my heart raced throughout, every glance and gesture charged with the weight of all we hadn’t said.
Another time, he came over to a place I was house-sitting. We sat on the balcony as a storm rolled in. When the rain started, sheets of water lashing the balcony, we raced inside, breathless, laughing. I got towels, and we sat at opposite ends of the sofa shivering, my body pulsing with longing. After a while, I told him he had better leave. I couldn’t trust myself around him.
He raised his eyebrows and laughed, shaking his head as he jogged down the stairs. I could see droplets of water clinging to the nape of his neck from the downpour, and I had to stop myself from reaching after him, wiping them away, putting my fingers in my mouth.
After Josh and I broke up, Ozzie and I started messaging again. Soon, we began meeting up. There was a time I had to put up a shower rail, so I called him, and 30 minutes later he arrived. He drove me to the hardware store, picked out a rail, and said he would cut it to size once we got back.
There was something about the set of his shoulders as he assessed the poles — the sweet mundanity of it all. A boy, a girl who loved him, a hardware store. I stood behind him, hoping it would take forever. I would have liked to stand there for the rest of my life.
We drove to a pub he took me to on an early date and sat outside in the heat. “Don’t do this,” I thought as his knee brushed mine. “Don’t drag me into this again. I’m just starting to break free.”
When he leaned forward and kissed me, I thought: “This place, with this person, is right.”
“You’re too good for me,” he said, bringing his forehead to mine. “This could never work.”
Perplexed, I watched in silence as he walked to the bar to get us another round. When he came back with our drinks, I didn’t know what to say.
An hour later, we pulled up outside my apartment but made no move to leave his car. He told me he had an early start the next morning. So I left, then I watched from my bedroom window as he sat for a while, staring ahead, before starting the engine and driving away, leaving me more confused than ever.
Soon after, I rented a new apartment a short walk from the beach. When I told Ozzie I was moving, he told me not to waste my money on movers. He came by after work and loaded my furniture into the back of his truck, covering my boxes of books carefully with sheets. I put my hand on his leg as he drove to my new place, wanting to ask why he was doing this, why he was being so kind if he didn’t want to be with me.
When he finished putting my bed together, I stepped forward and kissed him.We didn’t speak. He lifted me onto the mattress, which was still bare, the sheets folded in a pile by the wall. I pulled off his T-shirt, pressed my face against his chest, trying to hold on to something half forgotten. Afterward, he lay next to me in silence, took my hand in his. I looked up at the ceiling and tried not to ask him to stay.
Some months later, he came by and said, “There’s a girl in Adelaide.”
I felt my stomach sink to the bottom of a deep well. “Are you going to move there to be with her?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “She wants me to.” He trailed off, changed the subject, asked what I was doing for Christmas. I told him I was going to Byron, a beach town a 10-hour drive from Sydney. It turned out (of course it did) that he would be there too.
The first person I saw when I walked into the sprawling pub that overlooks the beach in Byron was Ozzie.
“You and me,” I said. “It’s never going to happen, is it?” I felt like an utter fool. For five years, I had carried the hope that one day we would find our way back to each other, and that when we did, everything would finally make sense.
He hesitated, looked down, then met my eyes.
“I don’t think it is, Luce,” he said gently. “I’m not sure we even know each other that well anymore. I don’t know if we ever really did.”
He held me, and I laid my cheek, now wet with tears, against his chest. I never wanted him to let go. I wanted to scream and cry and thump my fists against his chest. To ask him why he didn’t love me. Why, to him, it had been nothing more than a holiday fling — while to me, it had been a car crash. A life-altering love.
“Will you be OK?” he asked, his question signaling a dreadful finality.
What I felt for Ozzie — I have never felt that way again. I have known other men, had other lovers. I have fallen, and I have hurt. I have ridden the wave of heady lust and felt the easy comfort of the kind of love that didn’t leave me guessing. But that raw, electric, life-altering surge I felt for him? The kind of longing where someone crashes into your life and reroutes it completely? Well, I have felt that only once.
