The jigsaw depicts an early modern map of the world. Tentacled sea monsters snap the masts off ships and helmeted goddesses recline in the top corners, each with a single breast bared and the other draped in an off-white tunic. There’s no Africa. It’s New Year’s Eve 2021 and we all have Covid. There are three of us: me, and let's call them Daniel and George. We gather around Daniel’s kitchen table. Daniel is my boyfriend, George is Daniel’s boyfriend, and while George is not my boyfriend, we make out from time to time and occasionally sleep in the same bed.
Daniel is shuffling through the box. He is searching for parts of the European continent. George is searching for the arm of the top left goddess. The pieces rattle against the cardboard as Daniel shakes it about. Lana Del Rey is crooning from the speaker. Daniel and George sing along softly to specific lyrics. “What you don’t tell no-one, you can tell me.” They glance at each other as they do so. They are good at the jigsaw. They have developed a system in which George finds the parts with a red line and Daniel finds the parts with a brown line. I am feeling sidelined. I want to be proactive. I mean this in the sense that I want to be seen as making a positive contribution to the project, but I also want to feel like I’m an important part of our dynamic. Not just important, but indispensable: I want to feel like I’d be missed if I weren’t here.
Earlier, we watched a travel programme in which Joanna Lumley sails down the Nile on a cruise ship. I want to go back to that. It was neutral, it didn’t require us to cooperate. She drank the milk of a camel, posed next to the Sphinx, got drunk with Australian pensioners who did the same cruise every year. I’m a shy person. I don’t easily make room for myself in a group, and often find it hard to speak. I let others take the lead on what to watch or where to eat. It’s not that anyone is trying to exclude me, it’s just that Daniel and George like jigsaws and have approached the task with relish. Why shouldn’t they? Daniel and I have been together for two years, and Daniel and George for just three months, but there are many more things they like doing together that I don’t like doing at all.
We became polyamorous like this: it was summer. Daniel and I were on holiday. One day, we took a walk along a cliff. He paused by a tree to examine its foliage, also to examine the spider which had lingered on its bark, also to take a photo of the spider and upload it to an app which would identify its precise genus. Then, he looked up and said he’d started a relationship with someone else. His name was George and he thought I’d like him.
I hadn’t expected it. I had taken my fair share of walks around the polyamorous block and, at 30, had been ready to settle into my twilight years of relative monogamy. Every gay guy I knew was in an open relationship. Everyone was fucking everyone else. This, in theory, was fine, until what began as a casual hookup turned into sleeping over, which turned into coffee the next day, which turned into sharing stories about each other’s troubled siblings. The words “I love you” would end up being said. Soon, the casual hookup would want to be treated as a proper boyfriend, and someone would often get hurt.
I knew from experience. I had been the casual hookup more times than I could count. Again and again, I had fallen for boys with boyfriends, which was not without its pleasures: the decadence of always being left, lolling about in bed with too many feelings to put into words. My friend Frank said you should only get what you want “for the briefest window of time”, and the rest of your life, you should spend in the pining. “It’s called inflation, honey,” he’d said behind his cigarette. If the object of your desire were within perpetual reach, it would be worthless. You must only graze it. A whiff of perfume on a busy street: gone before you knew it was there, and then, you look around, thinking, Wait, what happened? Where did it go?
I’d gone after boys with boyfriends before, but I’d never had my boyfriend go after somebody else. I didn’t like it. I was jealous, and ashamed of my jealousy, but attributed the ambient throb of heartache to the fact that I needed to un-learn. I had been socially conditioned. I was heteronormative, or homonormative, a bad queer, or, indeed, a bad person. I worried that he was pulling away, that George had more to offer. I tried to make my love seem enormous and legible. I gave him books and wrote special inscriptions, and when we watched a movie, I’d bring a selection of luxury snacks. It didn’t matter. He didn’t want the snacks. He just wanted to date someone with whom he had connection and chemistry. Why shouldn’t he? I wanted that too.
He tried to reassure me. Just because he’d met someone else didn’t mean he loved me less, and there were things he could talk about with me that he couldn’t talk about with anyone else. He would big me up in front of his friends and give thoughtful feedback on drafts of my writing. We had interests in common – music, architecture – and he would drive us past Piccadilly Line stations of architectural significance. He would make delicious vegetarian meals, and came to Ireland to meet my family. It was his first time there, and we did a tour of luscious west-coast countryside and important places in my life.
I downloaded an astrology app. I downloaded another. I spent a full day inconsolably distressed when the second app told me the following month would bring about a painful reckoning in my love life. I deleted both apps and revised my opinion on astrology. No longer harmless fun, I said, no longer the inherited wisdom of our genderqueer ancestors. Rather, a sinister exploitation of heartbrokenness, I said, and it didn’t matter that I was a Cancer, George a Taurus, and Daniel an Aries, meaning that Daniel and I were an incompatible pairing while Daniel and George were a match made in heaven.
They had in-jokes. They played a game in which they imagined Spice Girls they could be if they didn’t have to subscribe to the existing five categories of Spice and could be a Spice Girl of their own invention, tailored to the precise contours of a personality. Stoner Spice, Abysmal Spice, Truly Gorgeous Spice. They drove to the countryside to listen to nightjars in mating season – Daniel said they sounded like dial-up internet – and I wanted to have been there for that moment too. I wanted to be an important part of the group.
It was clear that Daniel had fallen for him.
Complicated. Not catastrophic.
Sure, I wasn’t thrilled on the day Daniel began to embrace the phrases “ethical non-monogamy” and “relationship anarchy” and “I’ve met someone else” and “I think we can make this work”, but I had to admit that I, too, had nursed fantasies about alternative models of kinship, which is to say, I thought throuples were romantic and George was hot. He had a sexy beard and knew how to use a sewing machine. He was generous and creative, and Daniel was too.
George and I started hanging out just the two of us, then we started hanging out as a three. On New Year’s Eve, we were at a stage of our polyamorous journey when we were trying to perceive ourselves as a sort of family unit. There were moments when this seemed to work, but Daniel and I had never managed to relax around each other. He would get stressed in supermarkets or on the last day of a holiday, and his stress made him mean. I would become withdrawn, and he would get nervous that my feelings had shifted in important, unknowable ways. I didn’t know how to make him feel seen and secure, certainly not in the way George could, and he didn’t know how to make me feel that way either. There’s a gay bar in Hackney called Dalston Superstore. It’s narrow and impossible to stand anywhere without being in the way. That’s how I felt – like no matter where I stood, I was still in the way. I was in the way of their happiness, which meant being in the way of my happiness too.
It was New Year’s Eve and there were 28 minutes left in the year.
George found a piece of the puzzle that Daniel had been looking for.
Daniel said, “Thanks, babe.”
George said, “We make a great team.”
I wanted to be part of a great team too.
I stood.
I stormed out, but I am mild-mannered, and my version of storming out was barely legible as storming out at all.
I went to Daniel’s bedroom and lay with my head beneath the duvet. It was warm and quiet. I focussed on my breathing.
I thought, Someone will check on me.
I thought, I’ll be missed.
I stayed there until nearly midnight, then went back for the countdown.
They were still absorbed in the jigsaw.
They had completed its perimeter and were making progress towards the centre.
I sat back down and tried to gather parts of the sea.
“Evenings and Weekends” by Oisín McKenna is out now.