Fifty Shades of Summer: Long-distance relationships... | Stuff.co.nz

YOUNG LOVE: What makes it stick?

Fifty Shades of Summer is a series of essays on the many variations of love and romance. This is the true story that inspired a setting for Christchurch writer? TANYA MOIR'S novel, Anticipation, due out in March.

It's the island, I suppose, that makes me think of Jamie. For over two years I've been writing about that scrap of land, a mangrove-fringed hideaway with a ramshackle house, cut off from the world by the tide. An imaginary place.

But once upon a time, before I dragged it north in my wake and anchored it in the sheltered waters of the Waitemata, my island had a template. It rose - and rises still - 10 degrees to the south, on a tidal shelf in the roaring forties. It's the place I think of first, it seems, when I think of summer, and romance.

Jamie took me there.

We'd driven through Invercargill, heading west, between the Oreti River's mouth and Foveaux Strait, where the sun thins into the sea - a rough country of salt and paddock and marsh, of windblown gorse and muddy horses. And there it was, to the south of the road, a green hillock fringed with trees, dabbling its rocky toes in the shallows of Bluff Harbour.

''Careful,'' we warned each other as we waded off the southern end of the Earth. Beset, on all sides, by cinematic dangers. Quicksand! The white-horse-capped charge of an early tide. Jamie led the way across. Testing the ground, making sure it was safe. Holding back a sandy hand to me. I had visions of him sinking, suddenly, up to his neck. For what seemed like hours, we picked our way over the mud, each poised to leap to the other's rescue.

We were going to visit Jamie's great-grandmother. She lived there, on the island, alone. I have no idea why. Indeed, I'm ashamed to say I remember nothing about her. Just her house. Its elegant decay. Its dust. The snaky tangle of her garden.

I'm not sure how long we spent there. We explored, Jamie and I, following each other through undergrowth that drooped with the weight of fairy tales, hedges and thickets where sleeping beauties waited to be woken.
I didn't want to go home. We had to, of course, before the tide came in. The sea followed in our footsteps, and by the time we'd reached the mainland the island was cut off again, lost to all but its owner. I was too tired, I think, from all that sun, that sea air, to feel melancholy. We could go back another day.

I climbed into the car and drifted off as we drove home, my head on Jamie's shoulder.

Twenty-three years later, I got an email from my friend Sharon on the subject of True Love. Did I remember my first?

Well, of course. His name was Jamie. He took me to an island. It's not the sort of thing a girl forgets.

Drifting at my desk, four floors above the crowds on a wintry Oxford St, I remembered the end of that southern summer's day. Was it Jamie's grandmother up there in the front seat, driving us home? We were, if I remember rightly, 6 years old. Dozing in the back, two salty, sandy Southland kids, full of a chivalry learnt, I assume, from Gilligan's Island. Tarzan. John Wayne. We were too young to read romance.

The phone on my desk rang. ''He was here last night. Jamie. He lives in Rome.''

For the last five years, so had I - my husband and I had moved to London a few weeks earlier. Otherwise, we would probably have been at Sharon's house that night too. A night, seemingly, when the conversation turned to first love. And a colleague's boyfriend gave my friends - the gathered Italians, Canadians, Brits - a name that should have meant nothing to them. The name of a girl from the southern ends of the Earth.

''And you remember him too,'' Sharon said.

I did. I remembered the river where we used to play. The distant scent of the main channel, clean and cold, beyond the shimmer of hot gravel. And closer, under the willows, above the wild mint, its silty, musty old bed. I remembered the track that tunnelled down there through the willow glades from the back door of Jamie's grandparents' place, a grand, rambling brick house on the southern edge of my home town. A town where the slam of a car door carried the length of the single street, and sometimes it felt like the stretch of the yellow dog in the door of the engineering works was the only thing to happen all day. And I remembered that it was somewhere along that track - beneath the vault of trees, in the slow-turning shafts of green light - that I said I'd marry Jamie.

''Why?'' Sharon wanted to know. ''What made it stick?''

I couldn't remember the last time we saw each other. I couldn't remember whether Jamie stopped coming to stay in his grandparents' house or I stopped going to visit. I just remembered the light and the sun, and how easy it was, back then, to hold each other's eyes.

We never did go back to the island. Long-distance relationships are tough, and there were 60 kilometres between us. I have a nasty feeling I left Jamie for a cowboy, in the end. It wasn't the same.

- ? Fairfax NZ News

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Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/8134800/Long-distance-relationships-are-tough

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