1422 words (5 minute read)

The Beach



A few hours later, I’ve stepped into a postcard. The sand on White Sand Beach is cloud white. And the water! To call it just blue would be a disgrace. It’s so clear and juicy I could get drunk in it. Oh it’s so warm! Wow, check out all those palm trees. And the lounge chairs with the colorful umbrellas. And the restaurants in straw huts!


Johann orders us Nasi Campur for lunch - Balinese fried rice with mixed vegetables. I can’t eat. I have knots in my stomach. And I don’t want to look fat in my bikini.


He’s vegetarian. Has been since his older ex-girlfriend brought him to Bali when he was a fresh 25 year old. She sold handicraft at the markets in France like him, then showed him the beauty of buying from artists in Southeast Asia and selling to tourists with Euros. For the last decade he’s created his own business where he only works six months in France, then spends the rest of the year chasing the sun around the world. He’s travelled in Bali, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Nepal, India and Peru just a few months ago to see the Shaman in the jungle. Again. He tells me it’s nice to travel so much alone but he wants to travel with someone now.


“I just make enough for what I need, for my house in France, to travel. You already see it is very cheap to live in Bali. I don’t need lots of money. I can work more, if I need. If I have a family, it’s ok.”


“Would you ever live anywhere else than Bali?”


“If I meet someone and fall in love, I can go anywhere. Australia, Canada…”


He asks why I moved to Australia from Canada.


“My husband got a job there.”


Confusion flickers across his face.


“You know I’m married, right?”


“Non.” He looks surprised.


“I thought I told you that...” My heart drops into my empty stomach.


“I remember you tell me the first time we meet, but I think I don’t understand correctly…”


He looks so disoriented. I quickly try to recover. “My marriage is basically over. We live separate lives. We’re like roommates, we don’t talk or do anything together. We haven’t been happy for a long time.”


“Why you get married then?”


No one has ever asked me this before. I don’t know how an answer formulates from my mouth. “I was young, I didn’t really know what I wanted. I wanted to get away from my parents, and he’s thirteen years older. He had money and his own place and I had everything I thought I wanted. I think I wanted to be married, because my friends got married, and I wanted to have a wedding too. I love him. But I’m not in love with him.”


As soon as those words come out, I realize it is the truth I didn’t even know to be true until now.


Johann registers this information. I try to read him. His face clears a bit and he returns to his lounger. He rearranges his towel. As he lies onto his front, his eye catches mine, and in that very moment, I see there is an understanding that he is here for the same reason as me.


The reality is my husband and I haven’t really had sex for the last six and half years of the seven we’ve been together. And most of the time it’s me who initiates. I can count on one hand the number of times we actually do it in a year.


It’s not just the sex. For the last six months, I’ve had one foot out the door ever since he gave me an ultimatum: kids or divorce. It’s like the blinders have come off, and I’m starting to see things I ignored at the beginning because I thought the other things could make up for it.


We eat our lunch on the wooden tables in silence for a minute. A crying kid dashes in front of us. The whole beach can hear him. I wonder if Johann wants kids. If he does, I might as well rule out any long term potential right now. Not that I’m looking for someone else. It’s not like I’m going to leave my husband.


I always thought the feeling would come naturally for me, like getting married, buying a house, having kids. I thought I would have it all figured out by 30, but here I am on the last rung of the ladder before ‘the finish line’, and I want kids as much as I want to be a lesbian.


“Do you want kids?” Ok, he’s obviously a mind reader.


My first instinct is to yell HELL NO! But instead I mumble, “I don’t know. Do you?”


“It is up to her. It is more important to me to be with the right person. If I love her, if we are happy, that is more important. I am ok if she wants to have kids or if she does not want to have kids.”


This is what it must have felt like when women were told they had the right to vote.


For the rest of the day, we go for swims in the turquoise water and tell our stories against a backdrop of big black rocks and blue sky. Then we get back on his motorbike and head east towards the costal town of Amed, where he has planned for us to spend the night. We reach the top of a mountain, and on the right side we overlook layers of rice fields that tier like a splendid wedding cake. It’s a magnificent view of delicious greenery below.


“It is beautiful, non?” He’s saying over the loud voice of the wind.


“Oui,” It’s all I can respond.


Then I look to my left. There’s greenery, but it’s wild. No one has bothered to tend to it. It’s just growing haphazardly, like each plant is grasping for the sun over its neighbor. It’s dying for love. Dying to cross over to the other side. Yet it’s still green, although a lot of it is brown.


This is the crossroads of my life. I can choose to have this beautiful life, with this man or even without him, full of blooming hope and joy. Or I can choose my life with my husband, one of neglect and loneliness.


My marriage appears to have all the seeds of a well-manicured life - a loft in Canada, an apartment in Australia, jobs we both love, bank accounts with cards that have never been declined, no debt, designer furniture and clothes, more things than we remember to use and a storage locker full of even more crap. But we are empty inside. That’s left room for weeds to grow over the years, so many that the roots are deeply embedded in the soil. Even when you think you have pulled one weed out, it grows back because the roots of our issues have never received the attention it needs.


It’s like the skies are opening up and telling me: Look, you can continue to live your old life and be loyal to it, and this is what you will always be, the left side of the road. But if you just turn your head, and be brave enough to cross to the other side, you can have all this. What will it be? You can choose. You are now right in the middle of the road.