"fingertips have memories, mine can't forget the curves of your body..." (Harvey Danger)

I feel as if I should be quoting Anais Nin when referencing our brief affair, not a nerdy Seattle pop-rock band, but then it is not the job of mere words to live up to our experiences.

I've never believed in fate, always finding it somewhat idealistic and anthropocentric. I mean, how important are our lives and the directions they take anyway, to anyone other than ourselves and our immediate circles? But divine intervention or no, since I got back I can't help but meditate on the sequence of events that led to our meeting and smile.

If I hadn't wrenched myself out of my comfort zone just one more time, which I did with the support of a brand new friend, I wouldn't have ditched town that weekend to attend an obscure island music festival off the coast of Norway.

If the Canadian who accompanied me to the festival hadn't left me scarfing barbequeued salmon with our neighbours and, promising he'd "be right back" disappeared into his tent indefinately, I wouldn't have ventured beyond our campsite that afternoon.

If I hadn't wandered off down the island's main dirt road, vaguely recalling there was a source of drinking water nearby, I wouldn't have walked past the tent where you sat, drinking beer and chatting to a mutual acquaintance of ours who called my name as I walked by and introduced us.

We lost each other then. If I hadn't have sprinted back to the mainstage just before midnight, while trying to escape a sleazy pursuer I'd met on the ferry, I wouldn't have run straight into you.

The world did not turn as it did for us, but even so: if it wasn't for all of these things, we would never have met.

We met in a land where the sun never sets and in my mind, each meeting with you bleeds into the next like an endless, perfect day. There are flashes of colour, sound and sensation that sometimes warm me from within like that first sharp draft of whisky and, at other times, sting like an asphalt graze, sorrow or what-might-have-beens.

Your eyes, sea-blue and filled with intent, peering pointedly at me from under a forehead lined with 29 years of love and life and one heartbreak. The way you played the guitar perfectly and sang slightly off-key. My fingers, wrapped in yours and buried in your pockets for warmth as we waited for the ferry home the day after the festival. The smoky taste and pang of remorse when I realised that the sliver of meat I'd just nibbled off the fork you held out to me was whale. The invisible trail, which felt like hot, bubbling champagne, that your hands left behind on my skin. Wearing your t-shirt to bed in Oslo (when only a country, and not half the globe, seperated us) just so I could smell you. Arriving back in Melbourne, days later, unpacking to find your scent was fading and feeling irrationally, disproportionately sad.

Just as I know that you can't go home again, I know that trying to find you or Norway again and expecting either one of you to be the same is futile. I know that the very thing that makes first times so exquisite, prevents you from ever revisiting them. That is their magic. That is their price.

I know all this but, at least for now, I can't accept it.