Visiting

In a few days I am going to visit my lover's house. His other lover will have just left. I have asked him to put away any of her things that may be lying around in the bathroom. Too intimate for me to face. She has the opportunity to be at his home more than I do, so I feel strange about going. He lives in a wonderful house in a beautiful area, and I have always loved being there, but it is several months since I have had the opportunity to go to him (he comes to me) and in the interim she has been there several times. I feel like a second string, like I don't belong there, that she has supplanted me in that place that I love so much. I am aware that they have taken the walks together that I so enjoy taking with him. That they have gone to the same restaurants. I am concerned that she and he have been seen together round town and that people think she is his girlfriend - which she is. But what does that make me?

I am going to see at least one of his friends and I know she has met and spent time with his other lover, and I just feel weird about it. I have a sense of feeling inferior, an outsider, that there is some big secret that I can't be part of. Some of this, I know, stems from a sense of exclusion and abandonment I carry from my childhood (what a wonderful characteristic to bring to a poly relationship!), but I know there is more to it. It brings me back to the unanswerable question, the one that is entirely inappropriate to ask in a poly relationship, namely, why can't I be enough for him? I know that poly just doesn't work that way, that a poly person wants and needs more than one loving relationship, so it is not the right question. I can't help hearing it in the back of my head, though, from time to time, especially when I know they are together.

These are the bad times, when we are apart and they are together. It is easier when we are apart and they are apart. And it is just wonderful when we are together and they are apart. I love this man so very much and we fit so well together in so many ways. And I know he loves me. These bad times are to be gotten through. I drag myself from day to day and try not to mope. Only a couple more days...