In 2018 I attended a dance performance called Sinkhole in Melbourne. In the gallery where the performance took place, there were benches along two opposite walls. I took a seat. Shortly after, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen walked into the room wearing a white shirt, red pants and brown leather sandals. The whole room seemed to stiffen, and something warm and painful happened in my heart. She sat across from me, engaged in conversation with her friend. I tried very hard not to continue staring at her throughout the performance; I don’t think she looked at me once. Lacking the nerve to approach her to say hello, I left shortly after the performance finished.
Two years later, I was in a period of my life that can only be described – in retrospect – as chaos. I was working long hours in a stressful yet fulfilling job, spending every spare moment writing emotional essays on excess and aliens (for no readership but my own), taking meandering midnight walks in pursuit of the moon and indiscriminately dating strangers.
One such stranger was Camille. After texting for a few weeks over the fire-ridden summer of 2020, Camille and I scheduled our first date for a midweek evening in January. And because we are lesbians, we decided to meet in the poetry section of an independent bookstore.
Distracted with work and buoyed by an inflated sense of self-confidence, I had not thought much about the date. But as soon as I saw Camille enter, I felt an excited panic. I picked up Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes and pretended to read intently. I’m not sure exactly what happened next – the specifics of our greeting have been lost to the dominance of the burning feeling in my chest, like breathing too-cold air.
We got drunk on Montenegro spritzes – well, I got drunk. Camille plied me with philosophical questions and indulged my theories on aliens as a socio-historical construct (a rare audience!).
I became progressively more nervous as I realised this stranger was causing my universe to crack and reform at an elemental level. She pushed her hair behind her ears and spoke about a desire to live unconventionally; about how a home could be an open, porous site, rather than something closed off to the world. By the time we left, and after instigating a very hasty, awkward kiss, I was a wreck.
The following weeks were an excruciating exercise in self-control. Waiting for her to return my texts induced physical nausea. It was pure dizzying lovesickness in the medieval sense: a severe pathology that required medical attention, like drawing blood or drinking a potent elixir. I had never felt anything like it in my life.
Fast forward to a morning several months later, where Camille and I are sitting up in bed, drinking coffee. We are well into the first year of our relationship. She mentions Sinkhole, a dance performance she attended a couple of years earlier. I almost drop my cup. “Wait!” I say. “I was at that performance.” I recount her outfit down to her shoes (this is me, who never remembers what anybody was wearing). On Instagram we find a photo of the performance and see ourselves sitting opposite each other.
I knew it the moment I saw Camille enter the gallery, and again on our first date as we realised a similar desire for the way we might live. And finding out about our unwitting close encounter years prior reaffirmed what I already knew to be true – that Camille is a person matched to the niche of my soul.
Roslyn Orlando is an artist, writer and gardener based in Melbourne on Wurundjeri country.
