It's got what it takes, so tell me why can't this be love?

Of course, my brother didn't love Michaela, and so she was inevitably and unceremoniously dumped, over the phone. He told me casually when I asked what they were doing on a coming weekend. He just said "Michaela? Oh, we're not going out anymore". Of course I rang her to find out what was going on, and she told me the whole story. What little there was to tell. It was too hard for him, she explained, to have someone taking up so much of his time. A phone call a day? Sometimes for as long as ten minutes! I couldn't understand it. But I did love her, and he didn't. I would have re-laid the telephone wires from our place to hers if I needed to, just to hear her voice every day.

And this was the thing, she was pretty, but she wasn't the most beautiful girl I knew, her voice was nice (damning with faint praise), but probably unremarkable, she was fun to be around, but not the life of the party, smart, but not super intelligent. There was no reason for it, but then, as I have learned since, there is no reason for falling in love with anyone. It just happens, and it happens apparently at random. Sometimes while already in a relationship with someone, sometimes with someone else who is, and often with someone who doesn't respond in kind.

That was clearly the case with Michaela. It was wrong, anyway, she said, when I even suggested we could continue to see each other, he was my brother after all. And I can't deny that. I don't want to think, even now, about them being together. I'd seen them kissing enough, but I can't envisage them actually having sex, though I know it must be true that they did, and often. But my mind won't linger on the idea, and it never could picture that particular image.

The difficulty with teenage groups is their tribal nature. Sure, we all had best friends, but the group was solid, if amorphous. We looked out for each other doing things I would now think twice about as an adult. Crashing parties in suburbs on the opposite side of the city, sneaking into pubs with drug dealers, junkies, and assorted small scale criminals in parts of town the police tried to avoid. We were a crew, we were a gang, and as part of that gang, we stuck together, even after breakups. There was a kind of inevitable incestuousness within the tribe, as fleeting relationships formed and dissipated within weeks or months, until it seems we had all done the rounds with each other's exes. Except me, of course. I was an observer. I was removed from the activity while being at the heart of the action. As always, recording the history of the tribe, only to recount it later, in private, for my own peace of mind.

And in this case, Michaela was a part of my life. For a while. And she, as part of the procession of girls and ladies and women who did so in my life, told me she just wanted to be my friend, and having done so faded from view, receding into fog like a car in the winter night, tail lights fading into the murk. Then she was gone. And I was back on my own. I avoided my brother for some time, and he avoided the rest of us, avoided Michaela, until she had slipped loose the ties that bound her to us, her friend ending her alliance with whomever had dragged them both in from their parentally-approved private-school parties to our archetypal teen-rebellion lifestyle.

She also said something else that I have heard more than once in my life. A semantic distraction to relieve responsibility for breaking a heart. A pedantic interpretation of an overused word, which discarded all responsibility for the devastation the wordplay always inflicts on its recipient. "Oh, but I love you, I'm just not in love with you". There is no why, there is only a deep wound that is vulnerable to being opened at any time in future with that magic incantation. But you can't argue logically, you can't convince someone in words to love you. This despite the simplicity of convincing another that you don't with a simple phrase.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Michaela used to call my brother every other day. After a while, it seemed that I would answer the calls more often than he did, mostly due to my bedroom being closer to the phone than his. So I would get to talk to her every day she rang, nearly. We would chat about mutual friends, school, nothing. The usual teenage banter. It was easy, it was the most natural thing in the world, there was no awkwardness, there was mutual understanding, there were laughs and empathy.

Then after sometimes half an hour or more, I would call my brother to the phone, when he would summarily grunt out his responses to her questions. Yep. Nup. Maybe. Bye. I am not sure if he even thought about the fact we were friends, and had a possibly deeper relationship than they did. In hindsight, probably not. He was just like that.

And he didn't mind that almost every weekend he went out with her somewhere in the city, or to whatever house party we transported ourselves to, or whatever gig we might sneak into, she would ask me along. And sometimes she would bring a friend, which made it seem less weird in one way, and more like a double date in every other way.

One of her friends was a tall red head, who dressed, like many girls at the time, in op-shop chic floral dresses and boots. She was lithe and slim, and pale in the street light when I kissed her in the middle of some park around some scout hall in the far distant fringe suburbs of the city. I even went over to her place when we both wagged school, and fooled around for a bit, but nothing too serious. Then just as suddenly as we had met, I don't think I ever saw her again. And for the life of me, can't remember her name. Just her long, tight orange curls and her floral dresses.

There was nothing to hold me to her. Nor another I can recal who wore what I thought was the coolest green leather jacket ever. To be honest, anyone who wore a leather jacket looked cool to me, and the chances of me owning one any time was about as likely as a girl asking me out. On second thoughts, more remote than that. Jo, which was the leather jacket girl's name, asked me out. We had somehow come into possession of a bottle of vodka, which between Michaela, Jo, myself and my brother, we finished off in one of the parks along the river close to the middle of the city.

Having made ourselves quite raucously drunk, there was no way were going to gain entry into a pub. Drunk teenagers usually can't muster the bravado to get past even the laziest bouncer. So we found ourselves in a corner of a carpark behind some warehouse/office complex in the inner suburbs, and Jo had her tongue in my mouth, and I had my hand up her shirt, and the coldness of the asphalt was doing nothing to dampen our progress. Until we were illuminated by headlights and realised quite quickly where we were, and that in all likelihood it wasn't somewhere we were supposed to be. So we leapt up off the ground, and along with the others ran down an alley between two buildings that led to the train station, and the police car couldn't follow. Well, we assumed it was a police car, because we always assumed the police were on to our highly criminal lifestyles, in the way teenagers exaggerate the importance of everything they do.

On the train platform, my brother and I needed to catch a train in a different direction to the girls, and after drunkenly kissing her goodbye, Jo said "Let's go out again soon". That was the first time I had been asked out by a girl. And it certainly seemed like a good idea. Of course, I never did see Jo again. I don't even know why, other than the clear probability that I was actually in love with Michaela. I did begin to wonder if she would run out of friends soon.