THE END OF THE BEGINNING
My ex and I had been together six years when she was given an offer to do her PhD in Australia, all expenses paid. Though doing a PhD was never in the plans the deal was too good to pass up. She was clear to travel on a study visa, but I had already, two years earlier, used up my pre-thirty twelve-month work/travel visa to Australia. As her degree was open-ended, but probably not less than five years, we didn’t have many options. Flying back and forth between Australia and Canada didn’t seem like a great choice, at twenty hours each way and $2,000 per trip – doubly so because I was making little money at the time, and could only take a week or two off of work annually, and she was earning nothing. After talking to the university about options, they explained that if we were married I would be granted a spousal equivalency visa, allowing me to remain in Australia on essentially the same terms as her academic visa. We were both only 25 and, though we’d been together some time and were not opposed to the idea, we were definitely not thinking about marriage prior. So, mostly because it felt like the other option was, effectively, separating (which seemed even more silly) we got married and headed off to Australia.
Year one we lived in Canberra, the capital and where their national university is located, while she worked on coursework and planned out her research. Year two started with her making a preliminary trip to Indonesia: Jakarta, to acquire the appropriate research visa and possibly make some connections. At the same time – as she was going to be out of the country for a year and there was nothing keeping me in this fairly uninteresting, remote, rural, arid, inland city – I quit my job and moved us north to Newcastle, on the coast.
The original plan was that I would visit a few months in, maybe month three or four, and then again nearer the end of her time, in maybe month seven. But two weeks into her time there I got a phone call. Being there on the ground she was having a tough time and was pretty insistent that I go immediately to help her get settled in and that this was a much better plan than waiting four months. So I did and it was fine. We met some cool people, I passively helped her make some connections and we travelled around to get to know the lay of the land and see what she was going to be in for. I was there about a month before returning to Australia.
She called or emailed regularly, though communication was both expensive and difficult as she was so distant and often rural (in a village on the side of a volcano, close to but pretty removed from the nearest city, Manado, in Northern Sulawesi.) I was busy looking for work and settling in to Newcastle when communication stopped somewhat abruptly. She wasn’t communicating with me and I couldn’t seem to track her down, through any method. She’d been planning some trips to some more remote locations to interview folks so I wasn’t too worried, but as a couple of weeks passed I started to panic. Turned out she’d gotten sick. She’d diagnosed herself as having malaria and was self-treating for that but her illness wouldn’t go away and only got worse. She’d misdiagnosed what was actually dengue fever. Eventually she got herself sorted and someone to take care of her. But, still, she didn’t get better. It turned out that as she was recovering from dengue her caretaker, so it would seem, transmitted typhoid. By the time I learned of all this it had been some time (I don’t actually know the timeline here, it’s all a bit muddy) and I spent another week or so trying to convince her university to have her medically evacuated – or something. It seemed to make little sense for me to go to Indonesia, and the school and their insurance provider insisted that she would not be fit to fly if she was so ill. So the only option was to wait until she was well enough to get on a plane on her own… Eventually that happened and she returned to Australia and went to a hospital.
After recovering she was insistent that she go back and finish up her work. She’d made all these connections and was collecting all this great data and this was the whole reason we were here… I wasn’t super keen on her going back under essentially the same circumstances as she left; but she was better and knew what she was going back to and what she would do differently, and was eager – so I made no real objection.
Again we had a regular email routine and she called pretty often too. But eventually, again, communication stopped. After a few days, and my starting to get worried again, I got a very short and strange email that read:
You’re not going to understand but I’m not coming back to Australia. And you’re not to come to Indonesia. I can’t explain and it doesn’t make sense but it’s over.
What does one do with that? What would one do with that under normal circumstances? Was she breaking up with me, divorcing me, seemingly on a whim, via email, from Indonesia? Had she been kidnapped? Did she get sick again? Had dengue and typhoid fevers fried her brain? This appeared to me totally out of the blue and bizarre (even just for her to be short in her communication: I don’t think I’d ever received a one line message from her.) So, ya. I was in a bit of a panic, again. Do I get on a plane? Who do I call? I called her mom to see if she’d heard from her. (She was close to her mom and surely would have spoken to her in some form before, or at the very least after, making big life decisions…) Her mom hadn’t heard from her since she was back in Australia. I called my dad, too upset to talk really. He thought it crazy for me to go to remotest Indonesia, which was the only thing that made any sense to me. I’d been there and knew my way around a bit and even some people who I could enlist help from, at least getting information if not tracking her down – wherever she was. Ultimately, my dad and step-mother were adamant I not leave Australia. I was pretty much out of my mind and felt sick and stuck.
I didn’t really know anyone in Australia and ended up going to a counselor because I needed to talk to someone in person, and someone not emotionally connected to the situation. I went and explained the basic situation and the counselor, who argued firmly that I definitely not go. She said that there was nothing I could do about the situation; that there was no way to force her back to Australia or make anything happen at a distance; that, even if I went, if she’d been kidnapped or even didn’t want to see me there was very little chance, if any, that I could make contact; that going would only cost a lot of money, money I didn’t have, along with exposing me to any or all the same risks... (This bit of the conversation went by about as fast as you just read it now. The counselor was totally disinterested in the this person in Indonesia or our relationship. Instead she was immediately asking about my family and my parents. I don’t know what clued her on to this, but she was asking about who I had in Australia to talk to about this and then asking where my family was...)
We spent the rest of the hour talking about my mom. When we were done the counselor insisted I return later in the week, something I was very happy to do. (Again, the timeline from this point on is foggy. I think this was around June, 2006. I spent most of my time in the weeks that followed running, swimming in the sea, not sleeping or eating, and going to counseling…) I continued seeing this counselor, while going somewhat mad on the side. The counselor was justifiably concerned about me and regularly asked if I ever thought about hurting myself, which wasn’t at all in my mind until about the third time she asked, at which point it weirdly became just about all I could think about – which, along with a great deal of frustration, worry, upset, and sleeplessness made me feel legitimately crazy.
(There’s a whole other story here about how on my lowest day a stray cat walked up the stairs to my apartment, in through the open door, across the living room, and plopped itself down on the couch next to me and refused to leave for four days...)
I wanted to keep communicating with Indonesia but wasn’t sure how to do that. I decided to send a regular synopsis of the little happenings and epiphanies I was having during and after each counseling session. This seemed safe and not about us or the future or anything, while still being relevant and indicating that I was keen to communicate.
Eventually my emails got through and she responded. She said that I was to make a counseling appointment for the both of us on a specific date; that she would be returning to Australia for a two week period, but that she’d be staying elsewhere and didn’t want to interact before or outside of counseling. Of course this seemed totally fucked up, and didn’t make any sense, but it was infinitely better than “I’m not coming back and you’re not to come here.” I wanted more information, obviously, and didn’t understand what or why or, well, anything. That she was returning, however briefly, was all I really needed to know that she was okay. Even without much or any verbal communication, I was reasonably confident I would be able to tell what had happened or was going on.
The evening before our set counseling session I was out buying groceries and returned home to find her sitting on the couch. (Yes, exactly! WTF! It was like straight out of some kind of psychological thriller.) She was just there, happily reading a book, in the dark. I almost wet myself. She seemed fine, normal, like nothing had happened, at all. We just exchanged weird pleasantries and then didn’t talk. After a few minutes of this I couldn’t take it and went for a long walk, trying not to think about how messed up this was. (Of course I couldn’t. We’d only communicated twice: once she said she was never returning and then that she wasn’t going to be staying at the apartment, or even in Newcastle, and that not only would we not be interacting beforehand but that any interaction outside of counseling was not an option. At this moment I felt like she’d lost her mind, that fevers had broken her or something, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. All of this felt to me like a virus or parasite-induced bout of sociopathy.) I walked much of the night and returned to find her asleep on the bed. I crashed on the couch.
I was up running early in the morning. Later we met up, walked to downtown, picked up a coffee, and made our way to the counselors office. As with all good counseling sessions, this one started with a lot of crying. There were not a lot of words. She was pretty cagey about details or reasons, but was really just adamant that our relationship was over. We talked in circles a bit and used up our time quickly, but made an appointment for two days later.
After counseling we walked home. She then started to explain much of the missing information. She’d been hospitalized again. This time with an epic bout of gonorrhea. This was upsetting on several fronts: mostly because she’d spent two years researching and writing a graduate thesis in medical anthropology, looking at this same group of folks she was now studying, but on a different topic: the rampant HIV/AIDS epidemic within the population. So she was one of maybe two people in the world, not including myself, who knew intimately about the general sexual health of this small, insular community. But having gonorrhea meant, of course, not only that she’d had unprotected sex with someone there but was very likely exposed to, and could have possibly contracted, HIV. (I knew this and had only been passively and remotely connected to the research she’d earlier done.) The other upsetting, and perhaps Shakespearean, factor was that I knew the guy. In fact, I’d encouraged their association. He was a good guy, a faithful Catholic, and a student nearing the end of his time there: so he would surely make a good research subject, or could probably use some research money and would make a great research assistant.
...and one steamy night in the jungle, apparently, he proved to be a very good (or horrible) research assistant.
Though she didn’t say it (there were no excuses or explanations at all) she’d been lonely, on her own really for the first time ever, she’d been deathly sick… all of that and more. I wanted to be mad at her, but weirdly could never muster more than being terribly sad and feeling like this whole thing was fucking stupid.
The next day I learned a few more details, all weird and upsetting. The only thing I had to say was to ask if she’d gotten herself tested. “Tested for what?”, was all she had to say in response. I walked much of the rest of the day and was very much looking forward to our counseling session the following afternoon. The next morning she explained that she’d cancelled our counseling session and that she’d be heading to Sydney in a couple of days and flying back to Indonesia. I didn’t really understand any of it and wasn’t going to. And she was going to continue doing whatever she was doing. I felt like there needed to be some kind of intervention but, along with everything else, my counselor assured me that unless she was a child and I her guardian there was no intervention to be had. I knew she’d been communicating with her parents, and I too had spoken with them several times, and I knew she was still in contact with her school and appeared on top of her work, so that was something. (Though I did wonder how fucking one’s research subject/assistant would pan out with her ethics committee and if trading in a PhD for gonorrhea/HIV would ultimately be worthwhile; but anthropology was always a curious and mysterious pseudo-world unto itself, and in context such things may make some sort of relativist sense that I was incapable of grasping.)
She and I chatted, very clinically and distantly, and made plans to get rid of our belongings and to rent a car to get to Sydney. We did so and I drove us down a few days later and out to the airport the following evening. There we went through airport security, hugged, and then walked to separate gates. I returned to Vancouver and started university. I don’t know what became of her. We communicated only once, immediately after my return, when I prepared divorce documents. I'd love to hear her version of events.
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