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They stop kissing and smile at me.
"So go get it, son. If he's the one, it'll be worth it."
Heisthe one. I know in my heart, in my bones, in my blood, that Wilby Jebediah Linfox is the one for me.
And I also know something else.
Something I absolutely, under no circumstances, can share with Brant and my dad right now, because if I do, karmic exception or no karmic exception, they will both strangle me on the spot.
I'm buying a one-way ticket to Australia.
34
Wilby
It's a beautiful October day—clear blue sky, gentle wind, manageable temps, and the entire brigade is out. Horses. Dirt bikes. Buggies. The whole lot. I'm behind the control panel of a Robinson R22s helicopter, flying ahead to the paddock where the cattle are waiting to be moved northward.
Muster season is going perfectly. We've roped in all the usual crew, men I've done this with year in, year out for ages. We're on schedule. Haven't had any injuries. Nothing worse to report than a few stray cattle a couple of days back that delayed us by maybe half an hour.
That's pretty remarkable. We usually don't escape unscathed, so with a few weeks still ahead of us, I don't want to count my roosters before they hatch. But so far, so good.
Except…it's not good. It's not good at all.
I'm fucking miserable.
I thought that by backing off from Col, by dwindling our messages from daily to every second day, and now to just once or twice a week, I'd feel better. That it would signal to my brain that I need to move on.
But the brain is a muscle, and the muscle memory of Col is strong.
My head isn't moving on. And neither is my heart.
Slowly losing contact with him only makes the emptiness of him not being here so much more real. I miss him more than I thought it was possible to miss someone.
And it's a different type of missing than missing Mum. With her, the loss is that she's gone. Forever.
With Col, the pain is amplified by the fact that he's not gone. He's very much alive, living a life on the other side of the world. A life I can never be part of.
And it's not just the pain of him not being here that I'm dealing with, it's something deeper. Something I spend a good chunk of my life actively trying to avoid. Something that, if I dwell on it too much for too long, could break me. And that is the deep-seated fear that I'll never find anyone who wants to live out here, and I'm destined to be alone.
The difference with Col, though, is I let him in. He came here. To the house. Met my family. My friends. He saw this life up close andthenhe decided he didn't want it.
That's what hurts the most. Some city wanker who has preconceived ideas of the bush and what small-town country folk are like is one thing. But Col knows better than that. And it wasn't enough.
Iwasn't enough.
Anger simmers in my veins, but I try to rein it in. I don't want all the good memories I have of him to be overshadowed by the pain and rejection I'm going through now.
He never made any promises. In fact,Idid. If I should be angry at anyone, it's at myself.
And while I'm doing a reasonably good job containing my anger about the Col situation, I'm less successful at curbing my anger at the broader picture.
The fact that we're losing everything. Yes, I've accepted it, and I'm even grateful we get to keep the properties, but that doesn't mean I can't be pissed about it. Even if it's illogical and won't change a damn thing, I'm furious that this is what it's come to.
I wish Katrina had just talked to us about it. Maybe we could have stopped it from escalating and getting so bad? That's the thing, when people don't talk, when they worry more about how people might react than dealing with the situation at hand, it fucks things up even more. And we are in a monumental fuck up.
If Kat had just 'fessed up and told us she was in over her head, that she'd made a few mistakes, maybe we could have dealt with it.
I've made a mistake, too.
