Elixir: What We Sip Without Meaning To

When love fades but never quite leaves the bloodstream…

19 October 2025

• 1,988 words • 12 min read

A love that lingers like an elixir — intoxicating, healing, and impossible to forget…

The Pour

Nothing before or since has quite topped the excitement of my last love affair — the one that turned out to be ephemeral.
He was beautiful. I used to think of him and smile without realising it.

We lived five hours apart, but distance meant little when the current between us was so alive. We texted from the moment we woke until we spoke at night. Everything was shared — what we ate, what we dreamed, what we desired.

Ours was a deeply sexual relationship, even when we weren't together. I’d wake to videos meant only for me; he’d finish work late at night and make them for me. Every morning came with a “Photo of the Day” — a breathtaking cabin or view somewhere in the world. I’d imagine us there, tell him what I saw.

We met online. His photos stopped me cold — that face, that gaze. I sent the site’s version of a thumbs-up, nothing more. But he replied. His first line said he feared he’d be too short for me; I wrote back that he’d probably respond well to Seasol. He laughed. So did I. And that was that — the chemistry cracked open.

Within days we were texting constantly, swapping Spotify playlists, sharing fantasies. I’d been in a long drought; he was the rain. When he suggested we meet halfway, I said I’d rather drive the full distance. I wanted the adventure.

The First Sip

He had full-time custody of his two boys, so we met in a small hotel in a nearby town. I remember the drive: the anticipation so sharp it bordered on pain. When I texted, he was pacing. When I opened the door to him, he was even more beautiful than I’d imagined — but with something hard in his eyes, a guardedness I’d learn to recognise later.

We took a short drive, then returned. Within minutes, the air between us changed — all that waiting, all that wanting, suddenly real. It was frenzied and tender and almost ridiculous in its intensity. We barely stopped to breathe.

There was wine and music, laughter, a sense of something discovered and already half-lost. Later he told me about his wife of twenty-three years, who’d left him for a much younger man — their son’s friend. The wound was fresh; I could feel it pulsing under his skin.

When I left the next morning, he carried my bag to the car. We hugged. Two tears slipped down my face — crystalline in the cold.

“What’s that about?” he asked, wiping them away. 

“Just the cold,” I lied.

Driving home, I felt hollowed out — high, aching, confused. I knew I’d been given something, but I didn’t yet know its name.

He called that night. Said maybe we should leave it there.
So I said goodbye.
Then he changed his mind.

And that was how it really began.
There followed eleven months of a relationship that felt rare and extraordinary — one where I was utterly in love.

Fortnightly, we would alternate visits to one another’s houses for the weekend. The waiting between those times was always agony — a real-life roller coaster. Our phone calls were long and frequent. One Saturday afternoon, we spoke for five hours straight.

The drives down south were long, but I can still feel the giddy anticipation that built every single time. Technology allowed us to see one another travelling. When he was close, I’d wait outside on the street, literally jumping up and down with excitement.

He always made me his within moments of arrival.

We’d go to cafés and restaurants, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. People would smile at us — some even said they wanted what we were having. He made my world shimmer. I felt good, even looked younger.

He, on the other hand, suffered from anxiety and emotional dramas. Whenever that happened, I’d comfort him as best I could. There was something self-destructive about him. He wanted to know every detail of my past love life and would coax or trick me into telling him, then judge me harshly. I couldn’t win. Being honest, I didn’t want to lie — but everything I said was twisted, over-imagined, and held against me.

It was a Madonna–whore dynamic. I wanted him in the now, because the now was so vivid and full. But sometimes I couldn’t dig him out of my past, and it seemed to eat him alive.

We would often bring our boys on the trips each fortnight. My son fell in love with the idyllic area where he lived. At just fifteen, he began a little crusade — checking real estate listings daily and planning to buy a house there one day. He wanted us to move, but custody battles with his father made that impossible then.

The Heat Rising

Before I met my man, I’d booked a holiday to Hoi An, Vietnam. I suggested he join me and began my campaign early. He kept me waiting until the last possible moment before agreeing. Travelling overseas was a big deal for him — not so much for me. I’d always loved it.

We had an unforgettable time there — two weeks of easy togetherness. We walked hand in hand through markets, watched lanterns drift on the river, swam, touched, laughed. He got a tattoo. Stared into my eyes as the needle went in and out. When we returned home, saying goodbye was especially hard.

A month later came the summer fires in Victoria. My son and I were visiting him again, surrounded by smoke and shifting evacuation orders, living moment to moment. That 2019 New Year’s Eve, my son and I left early as a full evacuation for his area became imminent. Now, in my memory, it was a time of him and me in his bed, wrapped around each other and watching the red full moon through the haze.

We used to spend oceans of time in and on our beds — talking, drinking vodka, listening to music, playing hangman, lovers’ things, and more.

Soon after that, COVID hit. There were border restrictions between our two states. I counted down the days until I could see him again, then realised the law said I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere. But I felt I’d explode if I didn’t.

My son and I packed the car quietly and set off against the rules. We had excuses ready if stopped, but we never were. The highways were ghostly quiet — an eerie, smooth journey straight to his door.

By then everyone was working from home, including me. So began two and a half glorious weeks: lovemaking, shopping for basics, cooking, sleeping, walking, touching, doing jigsaw puzzles, working side by side. The rhythm of life, shared.

I couldn’t stay forever — my mother was looking after my cat. When the day came to leave, the goodbye was bittersweet. We’d had such a precious time together, and parting felt like trying to separate magnets.

As I drove away, we wouldn’t stop kissing through the car window. My son groaned and rolled his eyes and laughed. I can still see him standing in the middle of the road, waving goodbye.

That was the last time we were ever together — as we were.

The Slow Burn

There was no warning of doom. When it came, I was unprepared. He called to say he couldn’t carry on. He needed time, he said, to get things back on track. It didn’t compute. None of it made sense.

I spiralled downwards. My heart was ripped out. I lived in desperate hope for over a month. Lost weight from tears, from not eating. Couldn’t leave the house. When I tried to get food for my son at the supermarket, I’d have panic attacks and abandon the trolley mid-aisle. Everything reminded me of him.

I lived in my trackpants — my grief outfit. I was grateful for COVID and the privilege of working from home, because I couldn’t have gone to work. I was barely a shadow of myself.

There’d be the odd message between us, just to touch base, but nothing close to what we’d had. I faded further and further away.

Then one day, a text: He wanted to see me that Saturday. I knew what was coming — his tone was wrong, too careful.

After he arrived we drove to the woods. I’d brought a bottle of wine and plastic glasses. There, he read me a letter — ending things officially. Even though I knew, I think I was still in shock. I drank the wine too fast. The letter was gracious, carefully written, like a reference for my next relationship. Only I didn’t want anyone else.

We went for Thai food afterwards and both cried through the entire meal. I don’t think the waiting staff knew what to do with us.

Then we came home and had goodbye sex. I begged him to make it all go away.
He didn’t.

And my heart has never been the same since.

Time passed, but not in the usual way.
It stretched and folded, like something elastic that no longer remembered its original shape.

Days blurred. I’d see his name flash on my phone or computer, feel the air change — and then the message would be something polite, domestic, unbearable in its normality. I learned to answer like a friend, not a lover. Stopped looking for signs of hope. He found someone else quickly.

The months rolled on. My son never stopped his efforts to have us move interstate — to that beautiful area. I never entertained the idea until, one day, I did. Once my mind shifted that small gear, everything moved quickly. Within a few short months, we were in our new home.

I began a relationship with a new man after becoming a Victorian, but it was short-lived. I didn’t sparkle with him. That was five years ago.

The house I bought was built in the 1980s and hadn’t been touched since. It was sturdy but tired. There was much to do. Mr Heartbreak — as I sometimes call him in my head — was not only devastating, but incredibly gifted with his hands. A builder, a fixer, a maker.

He’d been going through a difficult time financially, so it made sense to ask if he’d like the work. I remember telling him the hourly rate and that it would be ongoing. Five years on, he’s still here.

The Aftertaste

He came back into my world in a way I could never have predicted — practical, helpful, disarming.

The man who once held my face in his hands now stands in my garden with a hammer, or a shovel, or whatever the day requires.
I watch him work and feel time collapse — not back to what was, but to everything that can’t be rebuilt.

The house he works on is the one I bought after we were finished, yet his touch is in every hinge and tile. Sometimes, when he measures a window or reaches for a tool, I catch the outline of who we were — hovering just behind him. Other times he’s cool, distant, and I have to look away.

There are moments — fleeting, treacherous — when we share a laugh and I feel the pull of what used to be. Then he’ll walk away, and I remember she’s waiting for him somewhere else.

I tell myself I’m grateful. That love, in this diluted form, is better than absence. That I can handle proximity. But there are days it feels like a slow poison — an elixir of longing I sip without meaning to.

He works. Makes tea in the mornings. We talk about paint colours, wiring, drainage. Mundane things.
But beneath it all, my heart beats to another rhythm — the one we used to make together.

Sometimes, late at night, I walk through the house and touch the things he’s restored.

The mantelpiece is smooth under my hand. The loungeroom has timeless French oak floorboards now, instead of carpet. 

He’s left his mark everywhere.
And in some quiet, traitorous way, I know I wanted him to.