Welcome back!

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.