November days in northern Italy are normally punctuated by rain, not a dark depressing or torrential kind of rain, but a steady drizzle broken up by moments of clear skies and crisp air. As November moved into December the days grew noticeably shorter and the temperature of the night air often dropped suddenly. I hadn’t yet experienced a real winter and the little glimpses i got of one during my travels in Europe during 2003 made me realise how hopeless an Australian male with a backpack full of summer clothes was when faced with the brutality of nature’s not so motherly ways.

On this late November night, returning home from yet another evening in one of the local small town watering holes the rain fell more heavily than what I had now been led to believe was normal for this time of year. Tonight like most nights over the last 10 days or so I was walking Mieke back to her apartment, we were drinking beer, smoking unreasonable numbers of cigarettes and no doubt amusing ourselves with the habits of the locals.
Mieke was a chain smoking Dutch girl, diminutive but with an attitude that made her look 6 feet tall, her head was topped with a fire engine red mane that she regularly threatened to shape into a Mohawk, deep down i Knew she could do just that with little notice.

We were two of the foreigners that descend on this particular Marchese small town pretending to be interested in learning Italian, although this was no doubt important to us, we each had additional items on our to-do list. Mieke had returned to check the reality of some promises made my a local Italian boy, and his inability to remember her face, let alone her name and his weapons grade set of oaths had let her down severely. I as always was there to experience life, to make up for lost time.

Tonight was different because it so happened to be the night after our first kiss, delivered at the doorstop of Mieke’s apartment approximately 24 hours prior. A simple lingering contact of lips, with fingertips entwined on the door frame. It was delivered like a reward, like some kind of milestone highlight on a project manager’s workflow timeline, our linked fingers letting me know that I had reach a key point but her free hand pushing into my chest was also telling me quite clearly that there was more work to be done and resources should be allocated accordingly.

The walk back to her place would take about 10 minutes, enough time for all the characters involved to have an arc, a story, a beginning, middle and end. We walked side by side, close enough to ensure that our arms would bump far too regularly, she would drift a few steps behind when the footpath become too narrow. Her shoes, or more correctly her left boot had developed a squeak some time during the evening, the sound was augmented by water splashing with each puddled step. Her pace remained steady, the pace of a person who was walking through rain they had anticipated and adequately prepared for. I walked erratically, not wanting to increase the pace but ducking under any available shelter, trees, bus stops, canopies, my scarf now merely serving to distribute the rain evenly across my back and neck.

Mieke took great pleasure in watching me jump between slithers of shelter but once satisfied that I had been drenched offered me half of her umbrella. I moved beneath it taking the handle from her grasp, the difference in our height meant that I had to huddle in to stop the rain from angling in and soaking her.

We paused to admire the absurdity of us reflected in the windows of a closed supermarket. I moved my arm across her shoulder perhaps purely for the purposes of balance and when we managed to synchronise our steps discovered that we were able to walk in a reasonably straight line, the only entrants in some experimental wet weather three-legged sporting event.

My fingers moved across her shoulder, around the point where her hair met the fur lining her collar and then to the piece of neck below her ear. She didn’t respond, her stride didn’t change pace or direction, her eyes didn’t turn towards or away from mine, she treated the moment as a simple mechanical exchange just as anybody would have, anybody other than the man allegedly directing the arm’s movements.

Over the next few moments, my face hunkered down into my chest, umbrella pulled down against us angled towards the direction the wind was blowing from, within the few cubic inches of relatively breezeless space created by us fighting the forces of nature I managed to sneak a few glimpses of the raindrops making their way down some strands of her hair. The streetlamps and lights from occasional passing cars reflected its brilliant red into my eyes, and despite the vast number of cigarettes we consumed that night I could still smell her hair, the strawberry of her often applied lip gloss, the warmth emanating from her fur lined neck, the sweet smell of autumn rain, German beer and skin bracing itself against the cold only an inch away.

I sensed some sort of movement, she turned herself inwards pushing her face closer to my chest. This may have been pure survival instinct but I was so keen to be with her that I was more than willing to interpret the lack of any negative body language as the possibility of positive. This shift of her weight, even if it was only millimetres was an invitation already several days past the RSVP date, stuck to the door of the fridge with a magnet, purchased on impulse at a service station.

I think she said something, what I mean is, she definitely said something but my brain was so engrossed in interpreting physical communication that she could have said “take me” or “get off my foot” and I couldn’t have heard.

The sound broke the camel’s back of my concentration, my arm slipped from her shoulder, falling like the limb of a decaying tree between us. This triggered my stupid stupid legs to move a few inches away from her. I made some stupid joke, sang some stupid line from some stupid song or something just to try and appear that I was still calm, she laughed, smiled looked up at me with the “you had me you meat head” eyes, the moment had gone, we left it sitting on a park bench ten metres behind us shaking its fist at me.

There are many kinds of fear, fear of being misunderstood, fear of rejection, fear of failure, but the fear that decided my actions that night was the fear of “what now?” that moment when you achieve some goal, major or minor and have to make a choice as to where everything now goes, what is right or wrong, what is fair or what is exploitation, what is passion or what is pure sport.