A Journey of Fate and Desire

God’s Will. That’s what Sam always said when life veered off course.

“It’s His plan.”

Easy words for someone who had drawn the line and stood behind it. Sam could surrender any disappointment to something larger than herself. A missed opportunity, an unanswered prayer, a marriage emptied of touch—each belonged to a plan.

I had tried to believe her.

For years, I treated every closed door as a lesson in patience. Every cold night beside her was another test placed in my path for reasons I might understand later.

Later had arrived.

But what if He drew the line straight to Nina’s door?

The thought felt planted. Perhaps faith worked like that—a quiet suggestion, a sudden certainty, ordinary events made meaningful because someone decided they were connected.

I followed it, step by step.

Each link in the chain had clicked too neatly into place. Nina returning to my thoughts. Her name appearing unexpectedly. Storms giving me reasons to drive. Coffee becoming conversation, conversation becoming memory, memory becoming invitation.

Too aligned.

I didn’t fight it. I couldn’t. Not when the path was so clear and inviting.

If Sam could use God’s plan to explain why our marriage had lost its intimacy, surely I could use it to explain why Nina had reappeared. One woman had closed herself to me. Another had opened her door.

Balance.

That was how I saw it.

I told myself it was fate. I convinced myself it was guidance. Maybe not divine—but something just as strong.

Desire.

I had run dry for too long. Celibacy broke me. Storms freed me. Nina offered shelter—and coffee. She offered yes when my life had been filled with no.

No, not tonight.

No, I’m tired.

No, why does everything have to be about that?

Each refusal seemed small enough to survive. Together, they became a wall. Eventually, a man stops asking to be allowed through. He turns around and discovers another road.

Mine led back towards Logan City.

The road knew the direction better than I did. My hands made each turn before doubt could offer an alternative, as though they remembered the route themselves.

I drove past our old school on the way. The buildings sat behind wire fencing, changed enough to look unfamiliar but not enough to release me. The trees were taller. The covered walkways seemed smaller than they had in memory.

I slowed without intending to.

For a moment, I saw Nina as she had been then—uniform rumpled, books against her chest, hair shifting across her face in the summer wind. She would pretend not to notice me until I came close, then smile.

We were always arranging something in secret.

Logan City had decayed like a memory gone sour. Buildings were tagged, streets cracked, hope bleeding out between discarded shopping trolleys and busted fences. The city had moved forward without improving. Perhaps people did the same.

Places remembered us even when we tried to forget. That was the unsettling thing about rediscovering lost connections. One familiar street could undo twenty years of distance and return the shape of a hand, the taste of a kiss or the words spoken during a goodbye.

Then it happened.

Our song came through the radio.

Howard Jones.

“No One Is To Blame.”

The opening notes passed through me before I recognised them. My fingers tightened around the wheel. The road, the school and the years between us collapsed into a single moment.

It was the same song that played the day Nina left me.

To her, it was music. To me, it became an explanation. No one was to blame. Not Nina. Not me. Not time. The song released everyone from responsibility while I carried all of it.

Now it cracked through the speakers like fate mocking me in stereo.

I turned it off.

The silence was worse. The tune continued inside my head, perfect and uninvited. I pressed the accelerator, but memory travelled at the same speed.

The quiet war between intimacy and desire followed me too. Sam represented loyalty, routine and the life we had built. Nina represented everything that life excluded. I could not have both without betrayal, but I could no longer accept having only one.

I told myself I was not betraying anyone.

I was correcting an imbalance.

Sam had her certainty. Her boundaries. Her plan.

I had years of unanswered need and a road delivering me towards the person who had known me before disappointment changed my shape.

A traffic light turned red.

I stopped at the empty intersection. I could still turn around. I could go home, slip into bed beside Sam and let this night become nothing more than a temptation resisted.

The light changed.

I drove on.

This wasn’t nostalgia.

This was now.

Nina wasn’t a memory. I was going to make her real again. Her place was minutes away, and every turn removed another opportunity to retreat.

The past had not summoned me so I could admire it from a distance.

I wasn’t going back in time.

I was reclaiming it.

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