On Being a Secondary: Inhabiting Paradox

When I woke this morning, it was still completely dark. The clock said 4:24. Somehow that seemed just about right, so I got up. It's now 4:47, still dark, quiet except for the hum from the computer and the occasional slow swish of a passing car outside (someone who works at a bakery, perhaps?). I'm going to see if I can write this post about Travis before my family wakes up and my day as a person with responsibilities begins.

Given my topic, it makes total sense that I'd be up at this ungodly hour, waaaay up the spine from the butt-crack of dawn. Travis has a habit of waking too early. He's also in Florida right now, three hours east of here, where the sun has already risen and the morning frogs are no doubt croaking their mating songs.

Yesterday, Travis's mother asked about me. “So, the fifty-dollar question: what's happening with you and Viny?” He didn't want to get into it just then, so he said, “Let's talk about that tomorrow.”

I'm a little nervous.

What is happening with me and Travis?

I've been watching the cursor blink after that last question mark for a good two minutes, and I still don't know. A little like the last two years, in miniature.

When Travis and I started dating, in June of 2009, he was seeing someone else, and I was married AND seeing someone else, which meant that ours was, in poly terms, a tertiary relationship. Some time in late August, between Date 5 and Date 6 with me, Travis broke things off with the other woman. He asked her how she felt about continuing to develop a relationship with him, given that he was interested in pursuing a more serious relationship with me, and she said No dice. It was an amicable parting. They made out in the parking lot and then drove off in their separate cars.

On Date 7, Travis and I slept together for the first time. It was kind of an accident.

Parker was at Burning Man. Drew had just spent the night at my place two nights earlier. I invited Travis for dinner, fully expecting that our date would be over long before pumpkin-hour chimed. But we lost track of time, and I forgot about how the gate to the community parking lot closes at 10, and also about how my gate-opener was kaputt. Travis and I stood in the parking lot, contemplating the closed gate. “Well,” I said, “I guess you're sleeping over.” His response was something along the lines of, “Oh no! Don't throw me in the briar patch!” I thought about giving him the downstairs couch, but that seemed wrong to me. So I bowed to the inevitable and invited him into my bed, even though I knew this night would spell T-h-e E-n-d as far as Drew was concerned.

Which meant that Travis and I had each given up somebody to be together. Maybe it shouldn't have been like that, but it was, and just as well: our relationship wasn't feeling “tertiary” to either of us anymore.

So, what has it been like, being Travis's primary-secondary?

Like living in a house on the beach, between low tide and high tide. If I look out the window in the pearly dawn light, or just before sunset, I can sometimes see little sandpipers of possibility running toward the future, making hieroglyphs that shine for a moment in the wet sand before they are erased by lapping waves.