Beyond Best Before

SHE WAS THE ONE he'd hoped to stumble upon the first time he went over as a boy. The girl from his fifties mind that never went away. That Bardot look, sweet and sexy, and she was the Swedish version, the absolute best version loving him madly and only. One of those women desired on sight, she made men's toes curl and cocks twitch if she was near. Some hated her because they knew they couldn't have her and others hated him because he did. He was a foreign guy from a foreign tribe stealing their woman, and not just any woman, the one they couldn't look at without wanting to fuck or break. Despite the many blessings beauty brings, she lived her life a visible minority in any man's or woman's land. She was lusted or hated, resented or befriended, on sight, and sisterhood was rare.

Beyond Best Before is a love story, a meditation from the dying generation on women, spent life and ageing as a Canadian immigrant in Sweden. And he was an old man by anyone's reckoning, sliding into the wallpaper and getting a little frightened now and then, not knowing how his moment would finally end. It wasn't the inevitability of failing health but rather where he was that fed his fear. He would never live in his homeland again. He would die among these frozen foreign people. Perhaps homeland would not have called so loud nor his mind felt such anomie had Swedes been a warmer, more open people as he recalled from youth. But he was older now and Sweden colder, and he had tired of the crap he was getting because his hair was dark and curly. After a lifetime back home as a white man, he'd become a visible minority.

The story floats with his mind between his now and his then, between Canada's west coast and Gulf islands and Sweden, seeking home.