broken/disclosure

May 22

I guess the best way to do this is straight-out, without a lot of rambling-around. So:

I'm not going to New York with Meg.

This is something we discussed a lot before I even came to North Carolina on this visit. The first night I was here, we went to the park (where the cops bothered us, you might recall), and talked about it further. It's a very mutual decision. For me, it comes mostly from being unwilling to leave California-- I feel like my life is just starting to take shape there, I'm beginning to find my place. I did my best to get excited about the prospect of moving to New York, but ultimately I don't want to go there. While it's not my place to talk about Meg's reasons for wanting to go to New York alone, I will say that she thinks it's very important that she do so.

This is it, though. We're not going to be the Tim & Meg show anymore. We're breaking up; when I leave North Carolina on Tuesday, May 29th… we'll be broken.

Just because it's amicable doesn't mean that it's easy. We still love each other-- that's not what this is about, not at all. And neither of us feels the other has done anything wrong. That's also a problem; we can't even really get mad, which would distract us from being sad. Meg's wonderful, fabulous, amazing, and I've been having a positively perfect time visiting her. But, for various reasons, we both think a parting of ways is the best thing.

Why is the best thing so often the hardest thing?

We're trying to enjoy our last couple of weeks together, and for the most part, we've been successful. We both get washed-over with sadness, and we've both shed a lot of tears, but we're also laughing together and having a good time. We want to stay in one another's lives-- I intend to visit her in New York. We're trying to figure out how it's going to work… but, somehow, it's going to work.

I waited so long to post this entry for a variety of reasons, mostly because I wanted the important people in my life to hear about it from me first, instead of online.

So. I could write about this a lot more. About crying, about the things we'd hoped for that we don't get to have, about the way my conception of my own life has changed, now. But it's too hard. I told you the important thing. That'll do, for now.

*

There's another important thing, something I've been wanting to mention here for a while, but for various reasons (oh, those various reasons!) haven't. It's basically the only big thing in my life that I haven't mentioned in this forum, and it's becoming very much like a big smelly elephant in the living room-- I try to walk around it, I try to ignore it, but it's big. I bring it up now because it'll make some other stuff clearer.

I mentioned a loooong time ago, when I first moved to California, that Meg and I were having an open relationship-- that is, we were both free to see other people (and we both have). I implied that this open-ness was a consequence of us living 3,000 miles apart.

That's not quite true. We've always had an open relationship. In fact, I haven't been in a monogamous relationship since, oh, 1997, years before I met Meg. Some people call this lifestyle polyamory. I was living this way before I ever even heard that word, though. To use poly parlance (which I find inadequate in a number of ways), Meg has been my primary for almost two years. That is to say, she's been the most important love in my life. I have had other involvements during that time, however, with varying degrees of seriousness and duration. I might write more about being poly at some point in the future-- why it appeals to me, what it's been like for me, and so on. Not now, though-- now, I just want you to know this fact about me. I love love, I love loving, and I love having many loves.

I also want to defuse the risk of misunderstanding on one particular point-- my break-up with Meg has nothing at all to do with my other lovers (one of whom I'll soon write more about). We're not monogamous, thank the gods; we don't have to break up over things like that.

We have to break up over other things.