Laurita is my wife. We married young. I was 22, she was only 20. I hadn’t gone to university and instead had set off travelling not long after leaving high school. I’d got round pratically the whole of Europe and the middle East. I felt old and worldly, but I know now I was just a kid. Now, 9 years later, I’ve recently turned 31 and don’t know where the time’s gone. Linda is older than me. She’ now 29. When we met she was a perky, firm bodied energetic 18 year old, both personally and sexually discovering herself. She’s from Puerto Rico but we actually met in Finland, whilst I was travelling. Her Dad was an executive and lived in Stockholm for his work. At 18, she was everything I needed. A traveller, open-minded, free-willed, outrageously sexy and generally curious about everything that the world had to offer. She snapped me up and within days we were living a magnificent fairy tail of hot saunas, quick sex in lunch breaks and open, free experimentalism. This woman, this girl really at the time, changed my life and liberated my mind.
But today, I see a different Laurita. We’ve moved from Stockholm back to my home town, Edinburgh, where Laurita is catering manager in a hotel. She comes home from work tired. The constraints of a mortgage and car loan have changed us both. I can feel the ratrace deflating us. I have taken a job as a music teacher, the only thing I know anything about, Jazz.. Besides Laurita, it’s my only love. The passionate firey symphony that was our love life has died down to a gentle birdsong. We’ve both got into habits, and neither of us make the effort that we should. Things have just become humdrum and regular. Not bad…. Just… average. Some couples are happy with average, but we began wild and so passionate … and I miss that passion.
I’ve been working so hard the last couple of weeks, preparing for the end of year school music concert. That’s a hell of a lot of work for me, arranging a choir of 30 kids, most of whom couldn’t sing. The... Læs hele novellen
