Today I see the people I love being ripped away from me. I see scenarios for losing the dreams I have let myself build over the past six months. I even see scenarios for losing the dreams that Jay and I have built over our three year relationship. People are taking sides, factions are forming, and the teams are all wrong.

In the past, Jay and I have told Michael and Ariel that if their primary relationship wasn’t strong and solid, that we couldn’t be with them. We’ve told them that we would all have to take a break while they worked things out to whatever conclusion they needed to reach. That system has never been engaged before, we’ve always been convinced to stick around. Sometimes we’ve helped, sometimes I think we’ve hurt things. I always feel like a bandaid.

This time around, I don’t think I can bear to pull the bandaid off. Michael and I are clinging to our relationship desperately. Jay and Ariel seem to be doing the same thing. For the first time today I felt like I might lose Jay if this all breaks. What is worse, he refuses to talk about it any further as of this moment. I’m looking down the track and I’m seeing the obstacles instead of the destinations.

It has become very clear to me that the people I write about here are real people that I have complex relationships with. Meanwhile, there is still some way in which I am a character. I’m pasted together with flippant comments on sex and dirty pictures and the occasional glimpse into my professional life via Twitter. But really, mostly I’m a self-constructed person. On the other hand, Jay and Michael and Ariel don’t have as much agency in their representations here. I try to tell my stories honestly and I try to make them beautiful and I try to see them as imperfect and very partial glimpses into my experience.

Lately, I’ve been hungering to show off the bad with the good. The petty feelings and fears and nasty fights. When this all started we were tripping through daisies and in many ways we still are. I thrill at memories of snuggling Jay in another couple’s bed and sliding Ariel’s hand up my thigh at the dinner table and shivering in an abandoned park with Michael while recreating his first kiss. But I also know that the other moments are what make those so beautiful. Jay calling me an insensitive bitch at 5am and Ariel clattering across my living room floor telling me in stark detail the ways I had hurt her and Michael coldly acusing me of devaluing his love.

There are times when the four of us tear ourselves apart and I think that we won’t make it. That something fundamental will break and we will drift, cut lose from our cores. There are other times when I think that we grow stronger each time we bleed out pain in this way. More honest, more real, more committed. That perhaps scar tissue is stronger than baby soft flesh and our battle scars are really growing pains. Hard fought and hard won. It knocks the idealism and fairy tale ending further out of my reach every time but I suspect that a dream more permanent may grow in its place.

I have a very visual memory. I think it comes from growing up with a father that was taking snapshots constantly. I take my own snapshots of moments. And short videos of them as well. I can see faces displaying certain expressions or particular words being delivered from the mouths of friends and loved ones. Today I laid on the bed reading a book and lazily stroking my clit. Eventually I tossed the book aside to concentrate more fully on my pleasure and an image flashed into my head. At first I ascribe it to my visual memory but quickly realize that this is an image I’ve concocted to illustrate a moment that I experienced but didn’t actually see. As I work my own fingers across my cunt I imagine Michael’s hands. I have an image of them, long graceful fingers and dark hairs and rounded nails that are just barely too long. Then I can see a vivid image of these fingers insistently prodding at my wetness, grazing my clit and filling me. I realize, as I come, that this image is invented. I’ve never actually seen what his fingers look like as they touch me but the memory is still clear enough to conjure the feeling again.