I Want To Love Them.

She ushers me in through the front door and tells me to wait while she calls on her husband to come meet me. It sounds like he is in the shower. I wander around the house, wondering where I should sit. When I was a young girl I used to go in and out of this house like I owned it, I slept here when my parents were out, she fed me when I was hungry, they helped me with homework and later, with the exquisite existential heartache of being a precocious teenager in a world that made no sense. My child doesn't have that kind of relationship with our neighbours, nor have I successfully adopted any of the children around our new home, but in our previous home, there was a lovely little girl named Priya who treated my house like it was hers. She'd barge in, knock down several candle-stands and tables, yell for me to give her some food, then she'd proceed to eat every single thing in my kitchen before declaring she definitely needed a mango milkshake as well. She'd try to get me into k-pop, asked me weird questions about my life and discussed the people she liked. A brilliant and authentic girl that I am fortunate to have gotten to know by virtue of the stochastic assignment of government housing.

I was that girl, the random occurence in their life who treated their home like she had the right to be here at any hour, and do anything. And now, I don't know where to stand, or sit, here. It's not because things have changed between us, they have, but that always sounds like an adage of tragedy, it's not, I am a grown woman now and they are older as well, I cannot have the same relationship with the people who watched me grow up as I did when I was growing up. I do not want to. It's one of the greatest things in life when relationships change. As well as I can explore nostalgia for a literary purpose, I find nostalgia suspicious, or maybe, I suspect that we approach it the wrong way. My husband will go to physical spaces and be surprised to find that his memories aren't leeched into the walls. He'll revisit his school and expect to find his experience of that time of his life in the chalkboards and desks, then he'll experience the bitter pain of realising things have changed and his existence from the place that was once so important to him, has passed unnoticed. His nostalgia feels like a desperate attempt to go back to places that do not exist. My nostalgia does not rely on physical spaces, in life, I enjoy how things are right now, which is not to say I don't enjoy revisiting the past, I like to idly time-travel as much as the next person, but the places where I want to go, the ones that still have me in them, exist only in my mind. I mapped them when I lived in them.  How they made me feel never left me, my nostalgia relies on revisiting the feelings those spaces left inside me, the structures they constructed in me and how they shaped me into who I am, and how those spaces are now, even whether they still are, has nothing to do with it.  That's just more colourful information for the story.

As I am reading the note their daughter has left on the refrigerator (to remind them to deworm their adorable and insane three-legged dog, Orion, while she is on vacation), I hear them come up behind me. I turn around to look at them. She stopped colouring her hair about a decade ago, a lot of them are white now and it becomes her. In her I don't see the white as a sign of age at all, just the colour her hair were always meant to be. There is such quiet brilliance to her, and always has been, it shows in her manner, in the slow and sure way she speaks, in how that changes when she is dealing with different patients. He looks way too good for sixty. This shouldn't be allowed. He's barefoot, as always, in comfortable and expensive cotton pants, he replaces a lot of knees now, that seems to be a more lucrative business than the humanitarian missions of his forties. He comes up to hug me and I do so easily. Very few people hug me with confidence, my husband, my best friend and him, he rubs his fingers over my back, but his wrist and palm stay still, firmly rooted against my skin. There is a familiarity to his touch, his fingers take the liberties of a lover. At any moment, I expect his other hand to hold my chin up and kiss me. I guess that never goes away. It's been a decade since I fucked him very much, but the body remembers, it remembers how it was last touched by this olfactory signature of pheromones.

It remembers the sweet sweat of humidity in the little coastal home far away from this place. It remembers the white Datura flowers in the garden and the feeling of grass on the skin. It remembers his fingers in its hair and his teeth on its neck. It remembers. It cannot forget. I know it is always a little hard to swallow when forty-year old men fuck twenty-year olds, I know it is harder still when those men watched the girl grow up to twenty, it's hard not to wonder or to worry about the exploitative potential of these relationships. It wasn't exploitative, it was as natural as finding another way to spend time with a person. He wasn't cheating on his wife, that was the nature of their relationship, I wasn't trying to fulfil a fantasy or acting out of coercion. He wasn't *waiting* for it to be legal. That day, he just touched me differently than ever before, and my response felt like an acknowledgement that I wanted to be seen, by him, as a woman. I may have called him daddy with a little too much fervour, but that's its own faction of the story. It was just a rare moment in time, when two people who know each other within the confines of a certain relationship, are allowed to hit pause and walk in other directions for a spell. Maybe it was the Datura, it stunned us into an insane hallucinated epistle to ourselves.

We never slept together again, but nothing else really changed either. He continued to see me every now and then when I went home, we talked about the bones in the bodies of our citizenry and the skeletons in the closets of our public servants. We argued, like we always had, over semantics, even though we were usually making the same point. He put on his gramophone, then tired of it because it didn't build out of music the rooms of his childhood, and switched to the surround sound. He dropped random nuggets of wisdom and reassuring words of appreciation. From one phase to the other, our relationship really only changed in the way that my body remembers what it is like to feel him on top of me, and when he touches me, in any way, the sexual response emerges as part of the signature. She puts her hand on my shoulder and draws me to the seating area, I feel a different kind of sexual response. From her. For her.

I think I would like to love her.

In the brazen athleticism of thrill-seeking youth, I was attracted to him, but in the flexible wisdom of peace-seeking womanhood, I am attracted to her. On a different vacation, in the same country as the one where I fucked her husband, I ran into her. We spent a day getting high together and I was not ready to meet that person. In him, I was seeking acknowledgement of my womanhood, in her revealing herself to me I realised that the greatest acknowledgement is not to be seen for your truth, but to be shown the truth of another. In her, I had always seen before a calm, beautiful doctor who worked for charitable clinics and always had pistachios to give me, but when she shared with me her entire self, I saw a woman so astounding I could have kicked myself for being so blind to it. As we sit down together, I think about that trip, I realise now that it was because of her that I knew that someone was listening when I talked. I spent my entire young-life irking the people around me with the things I said, she was never irked, she never questioned me, she listened and assured me of my sanity.

Years ago, in a period in my life when my family wouldn't talk to me because I dared to be an unmarried woman who lived with a man she loved without it being approved by a priest and fucked some women she loved without it being approved by society, she visited me at my home. I didn't know this then, but I was hurting, the world seemed to have it out for me, I was working all the time and garnering only hate from my environment, and I didn't see how it was making me feel, I often don't, she saw it because that's just how she listens to people. She is as quiet as her husband is verbose, but she never misses a syllable, not even one left completely unspoken. She hugged me for the first time that day, she told me I was doing a great job and that she had always known I would astound her someday. I didn't know I needed to hear that. There is intense eroticism to it when someone who watched you grow up sees you as a sexual woman for the first time and defiles you. There is intense peace to it when someone who watched you grow up sees you as a capable woman for the first time and appreciates you.

They gave me both things.

We talk about my work and theirs. She smiles on my side. He beams at me. This room looks very different from the house I used to barge into for bananas and books. The couches are new, the lights seem dimmer than before, the paint on the walls has changed, the dining table appears new as well, but these people they make me feel the same. I want to love them, in ways that would horrify my parents.