Out of the Shadows. Senta Holland

       I stayed

      I didn’t realise until much later why he took the photographs.

      He thought he would never see me again.

      He wanted to be able to prove to himself, old and alone and masturbating to the internet again, that this had really happened.

      So I stayed.

      I left the jungle island and the dusty boom town, I left the lizard behind who guarded my door. I abandoned all other plans.

      Our phone talks had changed.

      Calmer, more matter-of-fact, discussing details of my coming to Bangkok.

      Underneath, my body was expanding into the heat. My heart gave a steady joyous beat. Sometimes we stopped talking and just said are you there? Yes I am there for a few minutes.

      Then he would say something outrageous and I felt very lonely with my unspanked bottom. So I had to tell him that. So then he came up with something even more outrageous until my skin tingled in the dusty heat.

      I didn’t tell him I was going to stay for a long time. I only said I would come up to Bangkok. He made plans.

      ‘We need a place where we can make noise,’ he said eagerly. ‘An old building, with thick walls and large rooms and no neighbours.’ It seemed that he was on a mission to look into such places, and he had found one. He was excited. He was rediscovering his own city. A different layer of the city opened up to a different man. The hotel was just round the corner from where he lived. He’d never been there.

      ‘It looks like a palace,’ he said, wondrously. ‘And you are going to have two empty floors around you.’

      ‘How did you do that?’

      ‘I said it’s a guest who makes a lot of noise,’ he said proudly, ‘and they said it was no problem. They’re probably used to strange requests.’

      He made me sound like a rock star.

      He was looking forward to making me make the lots of noise.

       Of course my Nai was not single

      My Nai was not a very young man, and like me he had had lovers before. He was married to one of them. He had been married to her for a very long time.

      His marriage was a strange affair, at least to me.

      He didn’t actually live with his wife, but he also didn’t live as a single man. His wife lived in another town, an elegant place by the seaside, and she visited his house, where she had her own wing.

      My Nai had his own wing too and there was a shared central part of the house for entertaining guests and official activities. Yes, he was that kind of rich.

      When she was in Bangkok, she attended various social functions, and took part in a lot of events. To some of these occasions she was accompanied by my Nai. I believe a lot of the money was hers.

      They had not had sex for seven years but they were economically and socially interwoven.

      Many men in my Nai’s position here in Thailand, with a formal marriage that they honoured in public and a wife who was an integral part of their official life and their own social position, would at some point enter into a second relationship.

      In Europe we would have called such a woman a mistress (I remember that the French president was accompanied at his funeral by both his wife and his mistress who had been with him for over thirty years).

      In Thailand they were called ‘second wives’ and until recently they had had a clear position in society.

      Nothing in my European upbringing had prepared me for the eventuality of becoming a ‘second wife’. I had never even seriously thought of being a first one!

      I had never wanted to marry, and had never been married. Relationships had been on a voluntary basis, agreements between free and independent parties. When love changed, relationships changed too.

      I had never even considered taking a married man for a lover. I felt we wouldn’t have a lot in common.

      When I decided to come and stay in Bangkok I knew about the local customs, in the abstract. I didn’t really think that they might apply to me.

      I was sad that my Nai was not single.

      I was happy that he was my Nai.

      The fact that he was not single had so far been a concept. It had not had a lot of consequences in reality for me.

      And in fact, as our relationship developed, he was rarely unavailable because he was married. He was sometimes unavailable for other reasons, because he withdrew, because he shut himself away from everyone except his broadband, because he suddenly went away with his diving friends and equally suddenly returned.

      The fact that he was there, that he had appeared in my life, was real.

      As far as my life so far had taught me, he was the best available match. And I was his.

      I did say it was an unconventional story, didn’t I?

       The dream

      If you have had a dream forever – forever so you can’t even tell its origins in time.

      If this dream had come to you, fervently, night after night, day after day.

      If this dream had been hidden from everyone.

      If you had heard many times, during your youth, that such a dream is a sign of a diseased mind, of a deterioration of morals.

      If you had heard such a dream be laughed about, with dirty heaving mouths.

      If you had seen how such a dream was dragged down and made shameful.

      If then, after many years, you had been able to realise that none of this was true.

      If then, after many years, you were able to see it again as you had seen it at first: a manifestation of your true self.

      If then you had been able to say to yourself, not to others: yes, this is my dream.

      And your dream had risen up again, fresh and new, like a swan through the mud.

      If then, even, you had found the strength (and it is an incredible strength) to follow the map of your true sexuality and embark on the long hard journey of finding others who could be companions.

      If then, even, you had the unlikely and almost unbelievable luck to find them, some of them, not for long, not always the best match, but searchers, like yourself, bruised, battered, scarred, like yourself, from the long struggle both inside and outside, but, like yourself, never giving up, not surrendering to despair (except sometimes when the dream is so strong, and when the pain of not living it is sitting on your chest like an unbearable shadow – but you are strong, and you recover), keeping hope alive, as long as there is life.

      If then, you had found a partner who slowly, cautiously stepped into some of your other dreams with you, and you into his, you all the while kept holding your breath for fear it would all disappear, and you would be there again, alone, sitting there with nothing, soothing the broken dream, no, no, darling, don’t cry, I will go on trying to find you a way to come out into the world, you are my dream, my beautiful dream –