This is written repeatedly on pages throughout my diary, like a mantra. A is another reminder. She is the wildlife energy of youth. She left Barcelona with eighty euro in her pocket when she turned eighteen and hitchhiked to Asia via South America. So many men have helped her along the way, hoping for a piece of her innocence and beauty. She had learned to wrap them around her little finger. Four years later, she is sleeping in my bed at nighttime. By day, she is pressed into my chest as I am wrapped around her body guiding the fast-moving scooter shaking beneath our bodies. She laughs at my fragile rabbit heart as we race down Bali’s serpentine roads. Two lovers and a backpack on a scooter heading to nowhere. Two hundred kilos at sixty kilometres an hour. The risk assessment centre in my brain calculates the consequences. She is most alive when the adrenaline is pumping. When the racing wind helps to overcome the midday heat. 

She asks what I’m thinking. Young girls make great lovers but poor partners, I say. She says she thinks the jungle is green and the sky is blue. That she can eat fruit from the trees and sleep under the stars. It makes her happy. 

I ask her why she stays with me. Because you do whatever you want to with me. And you take care of me. For the past few months, we have existed in symbiosis. Older and younger. Bigger and smaller. Safer and wilder. I’m the one who dominates her. The one who creates security. In exchange, I receive her youth like fresh blood injected into my veins. It surprises her that she wants to bond with me. At first, purely physically. Later emotionally. 

I have seen the same pattern so many times. We are all looking for the same thing. Somewhere to let go. Someone or something to hold us. A pendulum movement between excitement and security. As dominant, I hold the frame within which the pendulum moves. But, at the same time, I also want to surrender. Who then holds the edge in this dynamic? God? At least not the young girl – says my experience, which sounds bitter. Yet, at the same time, it makes me happy. It predicts the future. Makes visible what I want – an equal life partner.