there were photographs and notes all over the apartment that were like “it was great fucking you last night” or “i’m sorry this isn’t a picture of us fucking.” from the beginning i was like, can you please move that stuff? yes, i know it doesn’t matter anymore, yes, i get that we are going to get married and have kids and we don’t care about anyone else, and i see that it all has a layer of dust over it and you aren’t looking at it. but i am. plus i took down all of the facebook pictures of my ex the second you asked and unfollowed my other ex on tumblr even before you asked because you started crying as soon as we tried to talk about it. so will you just move that stuff? please? 

no. instead i went to different therapists, including my beloved current therapist, who once referred to my “jealousy issues,” which almost knocked me over, because i have always thought of myself as supremely non-jealous, partly because i always think i’m really too weird and in my own lane to be in competition with anyone, anyway. 

it is hard, but maybe good, for me to think about it as my “jealousy issues.” but my therapist also asked me, the first time i saw her, “are you sure you aren’t taking all of your anxieties about a relationship with a person who is in no position to be in a relationship and putting them in a place where they are yours, and not his, to deal with?” no, i’m not sure. i think about the trauma as being less about the past, which we both had and knew about in detail before we were together—it was what brought us together in the first place—than about someone i loved and who was in love with me not doing the one thing i asked, the first thing i asked, ever, and acting like i was crazy to ask it, and in not doing it, forced me into asking over and over again, since it really did bother me, and made me feel like i was being refused the most basic kind of emotional protection. it didn’t bode well. 

the idea is that i was and am supposed to be embarrassed for asking, or even noticing, in the first place. (i’ve been reading queer theory since i was a kid! i should be invincible!) but feeling a little like a fool and speaking of it is my ethos, so even if i was, that would never shut me up.