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I was friendly with this Girl, a Canadian Backpacker, that I had had the good fortune, or bad, of meeting in one of the afore-mentioned coffee shops.  So to keep our budding friendship alive we used to meet a couple of times  week for a coffee, which was ok for me because coffee was the furthest thing from my mind at that point, being a guy in his prime etc.  Unfortunately for my intentions she turned out to be a person of integrity and it was established early on that there would be no physical interplay, save the occasional peck, because she was staying with someone else at that time and he was the recipient of such favours.  I was cool with that, disappointed sure, but I was cool.  I figured that I admired a person with such integrity. She eventually left my city and went home to Canada and I figured, well that’s the end of that.

            She wrote me a letter eventually, and we kept in touch via snail mail, no such thing as email then, now and again but I never really expected to see her again so you can imagine my surprise when she phoned me from Melbourne, Australia.  She said she was coming up to Brisbane and needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks.  I was totally ecstaticified.  Here was a woman who had rejected my advances a year before, and now she had the hide now to rock on up to my doorstep, so to speak, and expect hospitality.  Well, let me tell you, I told her I needed time to consider her request before agreeing to it. 

            So I took the full .003 seconds needed to consider my response, and replied in the affirmative.  I figured, as you can imagine, that the same integrity she exhibited before with her previous host would now be extended to me, since I was the host this time.  Happy days are here again.  So a week later I am at the Brisbane Transit Centre to meet her coach (bus) from Melbourne, trying hard to keep down the visions of unbridled passion jumping about in my brain.  When I saw her we exchanged the customary, long time no see, hug and I drove her back to my place.

            I should have known something was amiss when she asked which was my room, I showed her to it, waterbed and all, and she promptly turned around and went into the spare room, where silly me had a spare bed set up for guests.  I thought well, maybe she needs a few days to get into the moment.  I will unleash my inimitable charm on her.  I think she must have sensed my expectations, because she came out and asked, “Do you know what a promise is?” 

“er yeah, I guess.” said I, not really knowing what she was getting at.  She then said that she was “On a promise”.   

            Silly me still wasn’t 100% sure what it was, so she explained that she had had a guy finance her trip to Australia this time, and he was in Melbourne, and she’d promised to remain true to him for the duration of their separation, so I again figured correctly that I was not in fact the ‘host’ in the situation. 

Well you can imagine my despair at this stage, and there was nothing else to do but go to the nearest brick wall and savagely batter my forehead against it.  I didn’t know whether to become a porn actor, and thus get all the meaningless sex I could, or whether to become a priest, and get none, which was the status quo anyway.

Oh well I thought, at least I’ll have one more anecdotal experience for my memoirs