And sometimes, when the…

And sometimes, when the dog wakes you up at 1 a.m. barking at nothing at all, you actually get a decent bit of writing out of it. I'm not sure where this will go in Arbitrary Passions, but I think it'll go somewhere.

"When I say threesome, there is a good chance that someone will immediately want details. Did we sleep three in a bed (yes), did we all have sex together (yes), did we have sex in separate pairs too (yes), did we all love each other (god, yes), didn't anyone get jealous. Sometimes. Fiercely. But not until the end, when I had fallen out of love with her, and it was all falling apart.

Sometimes, at the end, we would all be in bed together, taking turns as we usually did, and I would see him not doing anything sexual at all, just looking at her with love, and I would start to cry. I would try to to stop myself before they noticed, but I rarely succeeded, and then they would stop all the fooling around, of course, and try to comfort me. Helpless tears aren't a good sign for the relationship. Relationships, because in a threesome, there are really four relationships -- each pairing, and the threesome overall.

Poly is usually nine-tenths talking to one-tenth sex. And ten-tenths love, when it's working. There's a word we rarely use, because whomever coined it chose an ugly word -- unattractive to see or say. Compersion. But there's a utility to it, despite its lack of aesthetic pleasure. Compersion is the joy you get, seeing your beloved happy with someone else. It's a very specific word, to describe a very specific feeling. For three years, we had compersion, and it was splendid. Like giving your sweetheart a bowl of their favorite ice cream as a treat, and watching their eyes light up. People are not ice cream, of course.

Limerence is a better word. Whomever coined that word knew what they were doing. Limerence is more commonly known as falling-in-love. That giddy sense that everything is wonderful, that your beloved is wonderful, that the world itself is sunny and rose-colored. Like sunlight dancing on the water. I never feel that way about Sri Lanka; our history is too complicated to allow for limerence, it seems. But even if there are no sparkles on the surface, in the depths, the tug is there. The beating pulse of the land, moving in strangled time with my own."