The Anticipation of Tuesday Mornings

There is a specific quality to the light in Adelaide during early spring that I have only recently learned to name. It is not golden or soft or any of the adjectives a poet might reach for. It is precise. It arrives through the kitchen window at exactly 6:47 AM and it lands on the same spot on the counter, where the kettle sits, every single morning. I have tested this theory for three weeks now.

I am a married gay man in Adelaide, which is not a confession but a simple geographical and relational fact. I have been with my husband for eleven years. We have a six-year-old daughter whose current obsession is the correct placement of her plastic dinosaur collection along the living room windowsill. I am an industrial designer specialising in assistive technologies for people with degenerative motor conditions. It is precise work. It teaches you to pay attention to angles and tolerances and the space between intention and motion.

What I have not told anyone, not even my sister who believes she knows everything about me, is that I have been seeing someone else for the past four months. I say this without shame, though I recognise the word carries weight. It is not an apology. It is a description of a choice I made, freely, and continue to make every Tuesday morning when I leave the house at 7:15.

The Geometry of Waiting

The Sikh temple fire made the front page of the Advertiser last month. I read the article while standing at the kitchen counter, my daughter colouring at the table behind me, her dinosaur army arranged in what she called a “protection circle.” The fire destroyed the building on Marion Road. No one was hurt, but the community lost a place that had stood for decades. I thought about what it means to build something carefully, over years, only to watch it collapse in a matter of hours. I thought about structures. I thought about what holds and what does not.

According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, 61% of people in same-sex marriages say their relationship has benefited from legal recognition. I am part of that 61%. I do not resent my husband. He is a good man. He remembers to buy the oat milk. He does not complain when I spend Saturday mornings in my workshop. He reads to our daughter every night without fail. There is no villain in this story. There is only the quiet, unignorable fact that I want something he cannot give me, and I found it somewhere else.

The Taste of the Next Day’s Coffee

The Tuesday routine is fixed. I drive to a café in the eastern suburbs, one that opens early and plays jazz at a volume that permits conversation but discourages eavesdropping. I order a long black. I wait. The anticipation is not a nervous thing. It is a steady, humming presence, like the vibration of a machine you have learned to trust.

He arrives at 7:40. He works in landscape architecture, which means he notices things I do not: the way jasmine climbs a trellis, the specific green of the geraniums by the door, the angle of the morning sun across the table. We talk for an hour. Sometimes we talk about his mother, who is ill, or my daughter’s dinosaur phase. Other times we talk about nothing at all. The most powerful moments are the ones I do not describe. The silence between his laugh and the next sentence. The way his hand rests on the table, not reaching for mine, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of his presence without touching.

We leave separately. I drive home. The coffee I make when I return tastes different, sharper, as if the morning has been infused with something I cannot name. My husband has already left for work. Our daughter is at school. The house is quiet. I sit in the kitchen and I think about the next Tuesday.

The Between-Time

I have been thinking about the film Call Me By Your Name since I saw it three years ago. Not the famous scenes, the ones everyone discusses. I think about the moments of waiting. The heat. The anticipation of a return that may or may not come. The way desire lives in the space between encounters, not in the encounter itself. That is where I live now. In the between-time.

There is a contradiction in me that I do not fully understand. I have always prided myself on decisiveness. At work, I make choices about materials and mechanisms and timelines. I do not second-guess. And yet, every Tuesday evening, when I look at the chili plant on the kitchen windowsill that I keep forgetting to water, I wonder if I should have stayed home that first morning. It is a fleeting thought. A small regret that lasts no longer than a breath. Then it passes, and I know I will go again next week.

The Hour Before

The most intense moment of my week is not the hour I spend with him. It is the thirty minutes before I leave the house on Tuesday morning. I hear the shower running upstairs. My husband is getting ready for work. I hear my daughter’s voice from her room, negotiating with the dinosaurs. I stand in the kitchen with my hands flat on the counter, feeling the cool granite, and I wait.

The government report released last year by the South Australian Department for Environment and Water showed that coastal erosion is accelerating at three times the rate predicted a decade ago. I read it on my phone while waiting for the kettle to boil. I thought about how everything eventually changes. Shorelines. Buildings. The way two people fit together. The erosion of a marriage is not a disaster; it is a natural process. You cannot stop it. You can only decide how you will adapt.

I am adapting. I am choosing what to hold onto and what to let go. I am a married gay man in Adelaide who sees someone else on Tuesday mornings, and I do not feel guilt. I feel alive in a way I had forgotten was possible. The threshold of the front door is the line between two lives. Every Tuesday, I step across it.