wispfox

Or so it usually seems to me. The smells of fall, the season changing to winter.

So when I am presented with something about which I can easily be melancholy, it sticks more than it might otherwise.

And so, I have a sad. A sad for a friend lost, not to reasons between us, but to jealousy and fear and anger. One on hand, I don't understand staying with someone when the major reason is, or at least has been, because you don't want to hurt or abandon the other person. On the other hand... I know that were it not for being really bad at settling for things, that is a trap I nearly got caught in. Second person I dated, believed firmly that sex meant marriage and commitment. Asked if I really knew what I was agreeing to when we were both _quite_ worked up. Of course I said I did. And, unfortunately, I _did_. But, well, hormones and yay slippery bits were why I agreed. Not because we fit well together, nor because I was particularly in love with him.

But I am one who _really_ doesn't settle well. And when I became miserable - both because I was a poly person trying desperately to be monogamous (in part because I didn't know poly was an option), and because, as I said above, I wasn't really in love with him - well. I _couldn't_ keep that promise. Not and survive. Even though I knew at gut level that it wasn't a reasonable promise, I still knew I'd made it, both implicitly and explicitly (when he asked, and I said I knew what I was doing). He was one of those 'desperately need physical contact' type relationships I got into when I was younger. So, eventually, with great difficulty, I managed to leave him (and go off to UNH; combining those made it easier).

But if I _didn't_ have that aspect of myself? I probably would have tried to make it work. And been quietly miserable until either it exploded on us, or one or the other of us died. I was _so damned young_, you know? I barely knew about bisexuality at that point, and had no clue about poly. And I'd promised. Or at least I believed that I did. And that you don't break your promises.

So yes. I have my sad. Sad because I lost a friend for reasons not our own. Sad because it seems like said friend is in a life of quiet desperation. Sad because... even if said friend were suddenly able to be a friend with me again, without the strings attached that would be true now... I would simultaneously welcome it and be very wary. If someone is willing to give up a close friendship once, where is the certainty it won't happen again?

But. I wish I could talk about school and garden and

metahacker and

jasra and NSPy and... and well, the fabulous life that I have now. But any conversations had would not only be between the two of us. While on one hand I understand not keeping secrets from a partner, on the other hand, it is not possible for me to have any sort of in depth one-on-one conversation if I know that someone else is listening in (technically, reading, but whatever). Especially not if that someone is jealous and prone to making unpleasant assumptions.

So. By writing this I remind myself of why, no matter how much I _want_ to have even a tiny bit of contact (garden pictures! Frogs! Fish!), it hurts me too much to try to do that. I tried that for far too long. Nothing, though saddening, is all that I can healthily do.

And so, I am sad.