Chapter 25
Lying in bed that night, I thumbed through my camera roll.
I had thousands of photos with Jay: At a roller-skating rink, toppling over each other, laughing.
In the fluorescent aisles of CVS, Jay studying the back of an orange DayQuil bottle with allergy-irritated eyes.
Us: a blur of limbs, an accidental shot taken in some gray airport-like place.
I came across pictures taken the month we opened the relationship. There was no evidence of the moment Milan had thrown in my face, but there the moment was, staring at me.
It was March. I couldn’t recall whether I was headed from or going to the restaurant, I just remembered I was outside when Jay called me, voice fraying.
“I know this is what you wanted, but I just… I don’t know.”
He kept the details of the woman to himself, revealing only where they’d met: Starbucks. Jay wasn’t even a coffee drinker but, throat sore, he’d stopped for tea.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then why does it feel like it?”
We learned that parts of it felt less wrong with time while others stayed wrong-feeling.
That jealousy still bounded on this side of the fence, turning up hungry.
Despite articles about everyone being polyamorous, others found it disgusting, abject, would rather you cheat.
These people understood a man stepping out as long as he knew where home was. Men were human, after all.
“Why?” Milan asked when I dissolved into tears over the phone. “Why are you putting yourself through this?”
I could’ve said I was chasing a feeling like everyone else, a grand one, the difference between standing at the tip of a pool and the edge of the ocean.
That slow then suddenly blistering moment when you’re speaking to someone, expecting boredom, but instead are jolted awake.
We’re told to fear this from anyone except the person we’re with, to flinch at feelings that rise from the wrong place.
But, for me, it was the same jolt that advanced art-making.
To turn away from that kismet glimmer, to not walk through that swirling purple-blue portal summoning you, felt spiritually irresponsible.
This bright threshold didn’t call out to everyone. But it called out to me.
What painless option was there in love anyway?
As I stared at pictures of me and Jay, I knew there was no way out from under the hurt of loving hard, no matter how many people you did it with.