Dear Stranger, Love from the Shoreline
Some people arrive for a moment and stay forever. A single conversation, a shared bed, a train carriage, a tide-pool of time and yet they cling. Like salt on skin. Like songs stuck in the back of your throat. Like the ones who haunt you not because they hurt you, but because they didnât.
This is for them. The ones who never returned. The ones I never forgot.
Dylan was one of the first. I was sixteen. A house party in Glebe, the air stale with weed and sweat and something on the edge of collapse. The night was winding down, or maybe just shifting shape, and somehow we were the last two left standing. Or sitting. Or slouching into each otherâs sentences. It was around 4am. He lived there. Dylan, named after Bob. Bob who was God to him. Bob who changed music and maybe changed him and, by extension, me. He was painfully good-looking. The kind of pretty that made you forgive his arrogance. Hair that curled like it knew secrets. Eyes that didnât flinch. We talked for hours. About protest songs and who really killed Kennedy. About how weâd never sell out, how weâd move to New York, how the suburbs were tombs and every adult was already halfway dead. Teen philosophy. Ripe with bravado, brittle as glass. But something broke open in me that night. I saw myself clearer through his eyes. He left no number. I never saw him again. But every time I hear Desolation Row, heâs there. Cigarette in hand. Barefoot on floorboards. Grinning like he already knew Iâd remember.
Then there was the boy in Campbelltown. My first Asian lover. We met at a beat. Those dark, feral spaces where desire doesn't ask names. But he did. He asked mine. And I asked his. And somehow, it softened everything. I was maybe seventeen. Full of hormones and half-truths. He brought me back to his apartment. Neat. Tidy. Too adult for how young he looked. I wouldnât let him fuck me. I wasnât ready. Still believed bottoming meant surrendering something too sacred. So he let me fuck him instead. And afterwards, he didnât rush me out. We lay there. Quiet. I ran my hand through the thick thatch of his pubes, dark and soft and unfamiliar. I remember marvelling at the texture. The difference. Not fetishising, just witnessing. He told me about growing up in Cabra. About being called âchinkâ and âfagâ in the same breath. I didnât know how to hold his pain. But I listened. And that counts for something. I never learned his last name. But when I see a man walk with that same mix of elegance and steel, I remember him.
And then there was Frank. The German piano tuner. Hands like maps. Eyes like closed curtains. We met when he came to service the showroom, a sea of Yamahas and one lonely Steinway that Iâd already fallen in love with. I mustâve been sixteen. Still part-boy, part-animal. Obsessed with sound, with machinery that sang when touched right. He barely spoke during the tuning, only nodded or grunted when I hovered too close, asking questions I barely understood.
But weeks later, at a work function, white wine in hand and loosened by the hush of late night, he turned to me with something close to affection. Or warning. Or prophecy. âWork fast,â he said. âDo not dally. But do not panic either. Some careers require diligence. Speed. The athlete has a sand timer on them, but the philosopher does not.â
I donât know why he told me that. Why he saw in me the hunger to hear it. But I remember it landed like scripture. I wrote it in the back of a notebook, next to my bad poems and Morrissey lyrics. He spoke like someone whoâd wasted years and wanted to spare me the same. Like someone whoâd tuned too many broken things. His words had the weight of fatherhood, but not the burden. A substitute father, maybe. The kind you get if you're lucky in your youth. One who doesnât punish or preach, just plants a thought and walks away.
I never saw him again. But even now, when I find myself rushing, spiralling, feeling the grains of time drain from the hourglass of some self-imposed deadline, I hear him. Not panic. Not dally. Work fast. Work true.
Caleb was Gold Coast gold. Thin. Pretty. Not beautiful like a sculpture, but beautiful like a bruise. The kind of boy you try not to stare at in daylight. The kind you try not to want so obviously. He came into my life like summer: too hot, too fast, too much.
We watched Seinfeld on my couch. Ate bad plant based takeaway. Fucked like animals trying to invent new species. He didnât make me laugh. Not once. But he made me moan in ways I hadnât known my body could. There was no real conversation. Not even silence, really. Just noise. Just breath. Just flesh and friction and the strange holiness of being undone by someone youâll never understand.
Maybe I struggled to talk to him because his beauty made me feel primitive. Like I had to shrink myself just to stand near him. Maybe we never had anything to say. Maybe sex was the whole story. Not a prelude, not a footnote. The story itself. A kind of language with no words, only verbs. And he was fluent. Wow, he was fluent.
It ended like a blackout. Sudden. Silent. No reason, no rupture. He faded out like a dream I forgot to write down. But I remember his face. The way it looked when he was above me, inside me, wrecking me with a focus that felt almost spiritual. I remember his cock, hard, thick, and merciless. And I remember wishing he would make me laugh, just once, so I could pretend we were something more than lust.
But we werenât. And maybe thatâs okay. Not every stranger is meant to stay.
Regan wasnât a flame. She was a flicker. A co-worker, not a crush. My first music store job, back when I still believed music could save people and that loyalty mattered more than pay. We sold flutes and fakebooks to private school parents and schmoozed politicians with piano renditions of Up Where We Belong. I thought I was on my way to something. Thought I was grown. My mother would drive me to work sometimes, one morning stuck on the highway with a migraine so bad she couldnât even move, her hands shaking on the wheel while I clocked in pretending nothing was wrong. I hated that. The quiet cost of trying.
Regan had soft eyes and shaky hands. We bonded over the bossâs mood swings and the smell of new guitars. I liked her. Trusted her. Thought she was one of the good ones. So when money went missing from the till, and fingers pointed her way, I stood up. Told him straight, She didnât do it. Fire her, I walk.
He did. So I did. It felt righteous. Felt brave.
But I found out later she did take it. All of it, maybe not with malice, but enough to make my defence look naĂŻve. Enough to make my sacrifice seem foolish. That broke something in me. That sharp little loss of trust, not just in her, but in me. In my radar. In my ability to know good from not. I walked out of that job thinking I'd done something noble. But what Iâd really done was choose blind faith. And blind faith gets you burnt.
She was a stranger, really. I didnât know her. I thought I did. But some people you meet just long enough to ruin your sense of judgement. Some strangers teach you how to leave, and some teach you to doubt your leaving.
Regan was both.
Patrick was all sun and salt. An Irish boy with sea-glass eyes and sand-caked ankles. We met on Ko Pha Ngan during that sweet stretch of suspended time where nothing felt real and everything felt possible. He made necklaces out of shells. Sold them to backpackers who smelled like weed and regret. He spoke in soft riddles and laughed like he didnât know pain yet.
We werenât lovers, not quite. But we were something. That kind of daily closeness where skin starts to forget its boundaries. We swam, walked, talked, touched sometimes, fell asleep in each others arms, never quite kissed. I think I loved him. Or the version of me that existed when I was near him.
And then, like all island things, it ended. I left.
Months later. Manchester. Cold. Concrete. Unforgiving. I was broke, brittle, counting coins for cheap curry and sleeping on night buses. About to run back to Australia with my tail between my legs. And there he was. Patrick. Walking past me like a ghost whoâd learned to wear jumpers. He was starting uni. I was starting to fall apart.
He didnât even hesitate. âCome stay,â he said. Like it was nothing. Like it meant nothing. Like he hadnât just handed me a lifeline wrapped in denim and warmth. I did. I slept on his bedroom floor in a crumbling share house in Old Trafford. Played makeshift instruments with him and his housemates over university approved curries and got myself back together, piece by uneven piece. Found work. Found my own place. Found a bit of self-worth tucked under the damp carpet.
And yeah. I wanked over him while he slept. Quietly. Shamefully. Longingly. It was less about sex and more about proximity. The ache of being close to someone youâll never touch. Wanting something youâd ruin if you reached for it.
Heâll never know. Iâll never tell him. But every time I see a necklace made of shells, I think of Patrick. The boy who didnât fuck me, but who, in some quiet, unknowing way, saved me. Not with his body. With his kindness.
There was one I never knew the name of. Sydney train. A slow evening chug from the burbs to the city. He sat across from me, twitching, eyes flicking like faulty lights. And then, the knife.
He pulled it out slow. Not subtle, not loud. Just there. Like a question. Like a threat dressed as a dare. My pulse tried to climb out of my throat. He didnât ask for money. Didnât say a word, at first. Just held it. Played with it. Glinted it under the carriage lights like a fisherman baiting a hook.
Our relationship lasted fourteen stations. And with every stop, something shifted. Each station a chapter. Each silence a sentence.
I donât remember exactly what I said, but I know I spoke. Calm. Kind. Curious. Not performative, not pleading. Just human. Like I was trying to call the part of him that was still reachable. Still soft. And I saw it. Saw his edges dull. His jaw unclench. He told me things. Not details, just enough. Enough to know his mind had holes. Enough to know heâd been hurting a long time. Enough to know he didnât want to hurt me.
By the end, he put the knife away. Said nothing. Got off at Redfern and never looked back. Only then did I ask myself why I never got off.
Perhaps out of fright, perhaps because I wanted to prove I wasnât afraid, perhaps because some part of me knew that if I stayed, if I witnessed him, fully, without running, I could carry the fear so someone else didnât have to.
Or maybe I stayed because I saw the boy beneath the blade. And I wanted him to see me too.
I never told anyone. Thought about it, sure. Wondered if heâd pull that blade on someone less calm. Less lucky. Thought about the blood he might draw. The fear he might leave behind like a stain. But I never reported it. Still donât know if that was cowardice or compassion. Maybe both.
What I do know is this. He taught me I can talk people down. That I have that in me. The voice. The presence. He taught me to stop assuming the worst. He reminded me that some people carry knives because the world taught them that was the only way to feel safe.
He was probably a little psychotic. But he was, for fourteen stations, mine. And I was his.
A kind of hostage communion. And then the train pulled on.
Theyâre all strangers now. But they live in me like landmarks. Some taught me to fuck. Some taught me to leave. Some taught me to be kind, even when itâs foolish. Some saved me. Some broke me. None stayed.
But they shaped the shoreline.
And I walk it still.
Love from the edge, Kaelib.