day130 - born to be an astronaut
i am on my hands and knees in someone's bathtub and i feel ashamed that i do not have the strength to keep my fingers down my throat long enough to do what needs to be done. this is the first time I've been here. I've already thrown up once and my mouth tastes horrible. I look up to the basin and remember that i used to dream of leaving a toothbrush here like an Apollo astronaut leaving their footsteps on the surface of the moon. I was here and that mattered.
Nausea wrenches my head back down. two people are watching over me. one is sitting on the floor to my right and the other is sitting on the bench above me, resting her suede boots on the edge of the bath. when I speak, my voice feels far away and I realise how disoriented I am after I say "I love you too" and the words evaporate when they hit the air.
just before i ended up locked in the bathroom with my two favourite people, the host's girlfriend arrived. we hadn't so much as exchanged a single word for two weeks. i wanted very much to greet her with a hug, to tell her I was sorry, that i missed her. i watched her hug my girlfriend and felt her eyes glide past me as she scanned the room. i know it probably hurt her as much as it hurt me. i felt like dirt.
this was a far cry from my intention for the night: drink a little, be charming, win everybody over. instead it was more like drink a lot, spend an hour(?) recovering in the bathroom with my girlfriend and one of the hosts, lay on the floor shivering in a blanket and leave in abject disgrace. it's not really my style.
i don't think rehashing the further events of the evening will help anyone.
outsiders get weird when observing non-monogamous relationships. sometimes they develop their own interpretation of events based on how they think they'd feel in those circumstances. often the fear of alienating loved ones just makes people even more hesitant to practice polyamory. I've gone back and forth over the course of writing this and despite my slight inclination toward self-martyrdom I don't really want to accept the framing that I was just a problem in an existing Good Relationship. there's nothing I can do to really dissuade people of that though. my name has been smudged plenty of times by the erasers of lovers, rewriting their personal history.
I think that the more time passes with no resolution or closure (and I don't want anyone to feel compelled to rush that process, which is partially why I restricted my audience), the less hope I have. The more I'll become a distant memory, the easier it will be to move on. I did some reading today on polyamory and the internet tells me with uncharacteristic unanimity the way I should feel. it's hard for me to reconcile any of it. i don't think I could judge anyone if they found the cost too high to bear.