I want to write to you with anguish
but only figuratively. and this is maybe the most vulnerable thing I have written on here.
During August of 2021, I was slivering through a relationship that was draining me from the inside out, head to toe, suffocating me in a snakeskin suit made for kinky lovers. It was a month before the End, the final Goodbye, the breakup that should’ve happened the minute I first met them in August of 2020. I don’t regret anything, but it doesn’t take away the pain and the hurt and all the shit I wish I didn’t have to feel or see.
This Sagittarius, or The Sag, who some of you know and some of you don’t, will not be named but if I don’t write about them someday soon, I’ll fucking explode. I feel tangled in anger and repulsion, how could I have gone so long? How do they still get away with it all? How did I ever let them? And simultaneously, there are moments where I am brought back to the in-between of chaos, the soft and quiet parts that make up a person no matter how healed or unhealed they are — we are all children inside and when we are being nourished and feel plentiful, we relish in sweetness. In those moments, I remember indulgence, laughter, physical embrace, escapism. I remember believing this person was unlocking a whole new world for me: one of pleasure and joy, separate from my raddled brain of anxiety and torment.
Our relationship took place during the first year of COVID. We met on Instagram and I drove 12 hours with my roommate and their new partner to see them. The drive was long and my heart pounded as I raced to get to their home in Philly. The first night I was there, I was so nervous and disregulated that I spent an hour in the early morning nauseous in the bathroom. My body knew something that I didn’t, but I ignored it.
The Sag spent our first full day together showing me their entire life, explaining that if I wanted to be involved with them, I had to understand all their grief and trauma and everything that is wrapped up in who they are. I nodded my head. Of course, it makes sense that this person who I drove to see (that I really just wanted to fuck) was giving me an entire hometown tour of their trauma. We went to the creek that they grew up going to and they dove deep into their childhood and the grief that consumed them. The next day, I met their mother.
I suddenly was in a whirlwind — being compared to this person’s dead father, being treated like I was already part of the family, fitting the role of “Nice Jewish Boy” for their idealistic dream. Yet, when we went to their Rosh Hashanah event that they were hosting, it turns out that one of their partners had no idea that we were romantically involved. On one hand, I am being lavished with soulmate-coded jargon and on the other, I am a total nobody to this person’s existing pod of lovers. Not once did The Sag think to mention me as someone they’re excited about to their other “partner” and lover.
This was not my first polyamorous experience, but like all of the others before, it was messy and already off to a bad start. This foundation of disrespect should’ve been a hint at what I was getting into, but I just let it tug me along because of how desperate I was for love, companionship, sex, obsession, something outside of the COVID hellscape that consumed everyday life.
I yearned for closeness, I took care of The Sag, I flew in the next day when their grandmother had a stroke because their best friend called me and said I was the only one who could help them out of bed. I was the only person who could heal The Sag and yet The Sag had no interest in doing the same for me. They knew of their power and of my weakness, knew what they were doing, how I was ready to hold them at any given notice, give them all my love and pour my care into any wound that needed mending. While on that impromptu trip to nurture them in their pain, I got a call from my mother — she said that my entire family got sick with COVID. My babushka was being taken to the hospital. No one knew I had gone to Philly to be gay. It was the first time I ever left Chicago without telling anyone. I sunk in my shame, sobbed with The Sag and our all-consuming grief and sadness, sat by a body of water with friends I don’t even talk to now, and held each other.
Somehow, in the wake of The Sag’s selfish need for me, I healed my own relationship to choice with my family. If I twist my own narrative, I could say that I was using The Sag, too, but I know that is not where my head was at. I was simply just brutally transfixed with someone who refused to give me what I needed. I spent a month and a half — the longest I’ve lived anywhere outside of Chicagoland — in a sublet in Philadelphia just down the street from The Sag’s house. I started seeing someone else, a Libra, while I was there and developed an overwhelmingly beautiful, loving, kind, warm dynamic with this person. I felt like I was finally managing polyamory in a way that felt good for me, but The Sag had no interest in knowing more about my life, this person, my history, my story, my interests, my desires. In the grand scheme of things, I actually have no idea if they know or knew me at all.
When we recount experiences with abuse or unhealthy relationships or toxic dynamics, it sounds like we are listing off red flag cliches that are so obvious to everyone, including ourselves, that we often ask: why didn’t you stop? why did you keep going? I want to believe in people. I want to believe in the possibility that people aren’t intentionally hurting others. I want to believe that I will be listened to. The Sag was relentless and self-obsessed, and earnestly told me that my needs were too impossible for them to even consider meeting. My needs in question were: asking to be on time for our Zoom dates and not an hour late with no heads up (on multiple occasions), checking in on me if they were going to have plans with lovers and not texting me during without warning, respecting my boundary around them sleeping with their ex (surprise! they agreed to the boundary but did it anyway), amongst many other basic needs. I felt like I was going crazy.
I would ask their best friends: is this normal? Is this just how they act? To their reply: yes, you just sort of have to accept them or don’t. Or my favorite, their impression that I would be the one to change The Sag. This was all under the guise of radical queer ~joy~, kink, polyamory, sexual liberation, etc etc. I am leaving out so many moments of embarrassment and humiliation, so many moments of me sobbing, lost in the chaos of this person’s deep-rooted manipulation and straight up disrespectful nature. During all of this, me and their other partner would confide in each other. The Sag hated this, but I had no idea where else to go. They didn’t want me to talking to my friends about the complexities of the relationship because my “friends didn’t know them that well” and “would take it out of context” — yep! So, me and the other partner, who grew into one of my very close friends, would affirm that the other wasn’t crazy or wrong in their feelings. It was all twisted.
Would I be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that looks back and feels grateful? Yes. I grew so fucking much in that relationship. I learned who I was as me, outside of anyone else, outside of my family, outside of my routine, outside of my fears. I explored new ways of being in friendship, I explored my sexuality and my relationship to play, I explored my relationship to how I look. The Sag didn’t make me feel good often, but there was also strangely a purity in our love. That was the thing that held me for so long. Something between us was real and powerful. When we hosted Shabbat and cooked together, there was something ancestral happening. When it was just us and the world was separate from everything, in our rawest and earnest moments — they were rare — but there was something that transcended time/space/reality. That’s the thing about love, though. It finds us and we choose what to do with it. Sometimes it serves us, other times it doesn’t, but we always leave learning something. The Sag taught me that I was capable of loving again and they also taught me a thing or two about choice. Though I wouldn’t live life as carelessly as them, I did learn that I’m allowed to access pleasure, too.
When The Sag and I broke up, we went to the creek and practiced the ritual of Tashlich, releasing what no longer served us into the water. I’m not sure if they knew that I was completely done, but I was. I knew that would be the last time I’d travel to Philadelphia to see them. I couldn’t handle the disrespect anymore, couldn’t handle them giving me nothing because they had nothing to give. We tried to be courteous with one another for months after, but I realized that I was too angry at them. I needed them to apologize and not just when they were feeling guilty. I needed them to apologize to everyone they hurt, including the partners that they were no longer with, including the friends that they disrespected and the lovers they treated as disposable. I needed them to do that and they couldn’t. I am sure they now live in fear of being “canceled” because they know of their own guilt, but I have no interest in doing that — whatever that even is. They know the power they hold in community and know how they take up space. It is not up to me to shift the entire social ecosystem that they take part of.
It took me almost all week to write this. I took many breaks. I decided to do it because if I didn’t, it would eat at me and all my relationships. I have to confront everything, whether I like it or not, because I want to be better to myself and the people that I love. I exist in the periphery of The Sag’s inability to do this. I exist in the moments of our love that were bountiful, hilarious, nourishing, indulgent and sometimes even wholesome. I exist in the hurt, the negligence, the pain, the insults and reactions. I’ve been asking this question of myself: how do you know if you are really in love? How do you know if you are ready to commit to someone? We love people, but we might not be compatible. We are compatible with people, but it doesn’t always resemble the addictive love that felt all-consuming. If anything, I’ve learned that loving someone is work, but it shouldn’t feel like trudging through a snowstorm or against bludgeoning wind in between two tall buildings. It should feel like the challenge is worth accepting, that the two of you want to nurture your love together. If that doesn’t exist, then maybe the love is just infatuation, not a tangible, living, breathing thing. But what do I know? I am, like all of us, still figuring it out.