I first met Jacob in the arrival terminal at Heathrow on 2 November 2020, which is also the day that we entered into a committed relationship and moved in together. I had just turned 22, he was a princely 23 years old.
In February of that year, I had pitched Jacob – who was then running a magazine – an interview with a band. For some reason, he’d said yes. When I was late to meet my deadline, he was so gracious that we started emailing jovially back and forth. He was funny, thoughtful and curious about me. The emails got longer, and then came the letters, the books, the Spotify playlists. He was in London and I was on the other side of the world, in Perth. I would often stay awake until the sun was coming up, just to be able to speak to him for a few extra minutes. Later, he would admit that he went through the extreme headache of getting his magazine stocked in a remote bookstore in Western Australia so that he would have an excuse to call.
Like me, Jacob’s early life had been chaotic. His parents, like mine, had had multiple marriages; he, too, had cycled through houses and step-parents and schools. We bonded over feeling very tired at a preternaturally early age, having frustrated creative ambitions, and our shared loneliness. We liked the same books, the same music. We had the same sense of humour. It was as if a part of me had been excised at birth, and I was meeting this other part of myself for the first time. This, in common parlance, is called projection.
It was a fairytale. When he offered up his apartment if I ever wanted to come over for a visit, I didn’t hesitate. Australia was locked down, so he wrote me a fake job offer letter so I could get approval to leave the country. This meant I would also have to apply for re-entry, but I wasn’t thinking about that. My parents were horrified. My friends were horrified. I had citizenship but no other safety net – if this failed, I would be alone in a foreign country with nowhere to live.
I went anyway.
In the arrival hall, Jacob missed me once because he was getting a coffee, and then a second time because he was standing in the wrong place. For a few minutes, I thought he’d ghosted me, until then I recognised a tall stranger with a beard and a baseball cap. My breath was punched out of me. Wordlessly, we crashed into each other.
Things were immediately difficult. Things were actually very hard. Our relationship was turbo-charged. We plunged into each other’s worst habits a week into knowing each other. He had lied about liking to cook or read poetry; I had lied about being athletic and knowing how to dress. He was a workaholic; I slept in late. How could he think that sweatpants were ‘uncouth’? I wanted to kill him.
We fought terribly. In person, he turned out to be totally different from me in every conceivable way: class, religion, culture. We were two pieces of different jigsaw puzzles trying to smush into each other. There was no coherent picture.
