what I do in bed with my girlfriend ever since I broke up with the woman I wasn’t dating

These days, the thing I really like to do in the bedroom with my girlfriend, who is usually naked or near nude, is lay on top of her breasts and tell her about the woman I am in love with, who isn’t her.

It normally goes something like this:

“It’s just that [pregnant pause] … it’s not that I’-[abortive pause], it’s more that I feel the absence of something, not that I’m wanting something.”

She politely listens to me say nonsense like that, “mmm-hmm-ing” with her eyes closed, my head slowly rising and falling with her breathing. I now associate safety with the feeling of her fingers tangled in my curly, dark hair and the give of her soft breast against my cheek.

That isn’t true, mind you, what I said to her above.

I am definitely wanting something, day-by-day, far more accurately hour-by-hour.

At worst I feel an unbearable minute-by-minute churning of crazy desire deep down where I suppose my gut is? Or whatever people call that area that flares up whenever you’re so, so upset that you actually get light headed, so your body kicks it down to your middles.

Sorry. I’m spiraling. Let me explain why lately I am telling my naked girlfriend platitudes in bed with her.

Before I met her, this other woman, people to me were ping-pong. I didn’t know people to me were ping-pong.

When I see people, my mind gets in formation. Anything they do is a serve. And I’m pretty good, I think, so I hit it back, my words. We rally. My eyes are glued to the words, never anything else. Not their face — definitely not. Everything moves so fast, so I need to concentrate.

If you are to my left, or to my right, you are a blur. Everything is a blur until they’re gone. I frequently win, though often I also hit it in the net. But no matter what, I’m playing ping-pong. Humans are ping-pong. Humans are ping-pong matches I have to play and I didn’t know I was forced to play 25 times a day: on the elevator, at lunch, when I invite them over, even laying in bed at night.

It was a glacial realization that she had never served to me. When I realized it, I simultaneously realized I had been playing ping-pong with every other human I have ever met.

What had I been doing all my life?

Without hitting to where she was, or where she wasn’t, I could finally concentrate on, for instance, what her eyes looked like (brown). Whenever I would speak, she would calmly walk over and take my words in her hands, and she’d read them slowly, and respond, and this process was not one.

I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t trying to win. I wasn’t anything. I wasn’t playing.

Okay, so, uh…it’s not like I’m horny thinking of her…I just, I mean … I just want to be around her. Really bad.

Another lost point.

Sigh.

I am sighing along with everyone when say I my want for this other woman is all-consuming.

It’s like how your body “wants” all of its limbs, which is technically a “need” (although I am trying to learn to not need her), and you could even live without limbs, but I desperately do want them all, and maybe in this particular circumstance I’m developing a metaphorical phantom limb, which while a redundant phrase is similarly, severely painful and totally useless, but my brain visualizes the dotted lines where she is supposed to go and at least that exercise makes me feel whole again, and…

“Mmm-hmm.”

Sorry. I’m spiraling again.

Does “absence” make it sound a little better? Instead of “wanting”? “Wanting” just sounds so strong. I feel a defining absence for this other person who is not holding me and chooses to not hold me while my girlfriend holds me instead.

Here is a different lie I’ve told countless times as a means to make my partner feel better, though I suspect realistically only makes myself feel better:

“Of course, I don’t know her how I know you.”

Not true. Or true only in its technical meaning. I’ve known — and I mean this in the truest possible sense of the word “known” — this other woman well before I even met her.

I do not mean this romantically as much as I mean it in a spacey way.

This other woman whom I love— the one who isn’t my girlfriend — I know her by her hesitant demeanor when she speaks to virtually anyone; the way she often refuses eye contact; the paleness of her skin except for where paleness abruptly gives way to splotches; through my total comprehension of how curiosity can often be stifled by self-preserving sarcasm; the darkness of her hair and her ginormous irises and her arched eyebrows and by her interwoven spanglish; I artlessly try and describe all of these things to people all of the time.

It doesn’t work, though. Usually these longwinded soliloquies are born from some hesitant-but-still-trying-to-be-nice inquiry regarding my thoughtless, erratic behavior over the last couple years.

Yes, people notice I’ve lost my mind and, no, no one wants to hear my stupid, dumb list of things I love about her. I mean, anyone could clearly see the person directly in front of them — ranting and waving their arms — if they wanted to witness the exact same things I rapidly fire off from that list.

“How are you feeling right now, baby?”

What makes this lie a show-stopper of stupidity — the lie about how I reserve my deepest intimacy of knowing for only the most profound of suitors, like my girlfriend— is that none of those listed things are even inherently good qualities.

Why am I pretending my synaptic knots are only for the worthy? The girl of my dreams looks up at the corner of the ceiling when she speaks.

“I’m…okay-ish.”

But if I may defend this woman’s honor for a moment, I’d like to impress this little fact upon you: she learned of the phrase “non-congenital” later in life, just like I had to! Oh, and also, let me tell you this amazing story about how she finally met the other side of her family in her late 20s… she never really knew where she came from growing up. How cool and mysterious is that? I sometimes wonder where I come from, too.

One more thing … since you’re already here: did you know we are both over half southern-European? Spanish/Portuguese, mostly. That’s why we look so incredibly white, even though we were both born in Mexico. The Mexican part accounts for almost a quarter native American ancestry, actually. We’re also a few percentage points Jewish and African. I know all of this because of the DNA test that she bought for me! Well, okay, my girlfriend actually paid for it all … she just offered up her free coupon. I think she was probably thinking of me, though, when she told her I could use it.

But she is gone now. Incidentally, not instead of, my girlfriend of ten wonderful years, the woman I concretely understand, and aspire to emulate at every turn, she is present with me. And she is sorry. What I do with her in bed ever since I broke up with the woman I wasn’t dating is mostly respond to the question, “Why aren’t you feeling well?”

We don’t rehash the answer in the middle part of the day when I’m feeling most poorly. But in the mornings before we get ready, and at night after we’ve eaten, she holds me, and she listens to my response.

This one lie is killing me. It’s a lie of omission: I don’t cry the way my body is trying to cry. I don’t let it. Perhaps only once, I did thrash and sob and weep and gasp for air during a particularly bad episode, after the first time this woman broke it off with me. But who has the time for that kind of honesty? Not me.

Not for someone who chooses, every single day, not to talk to me. Not for someone I was never even with.

I should mention that due to spending so many months disallowed from talking to her, because of her boyfriend, I can’t know if my feelings are even synching up with her’s. Have my feelings grown monstrously out of proportion with her feelings for me? Is crying even allowed? I mean, does she still have feelings for me in the first place?

I live in constant ambiguity, which fuels much of my guilt and sadness.

I expressed this disconnect to my therapist so that I could appear sensible and responsible while I had tears streaking down my face and onto her couch.

“I was never even in a relationship with her!”

“Yes, you were. You are in relation to her.”

“It’s not like she died. We’re all just sitting around talking about never getting to date!”

“Grief is exactly that. There is no wrong or right grief, and you absolutely have some right now.”

The exact way this “holding back tears” lie works is that any time I’m outside of this office, I strap each feeling down so it won’t scream and yelp and sob and hurumph and mess up people’s dinner, exclaiming, “HELLO!? THE MOST AMAZING PERSON I’VE EVER MET ISN’T HERE RIGHT NOW!?” This is a service I provide for those whom I want to make appearances for. That my girlfriend wipes every tear I produce off from my cheek — before it can even make a drip onto the comforter — is the loudest my grief ever gets. I am silent most of the day and she tells me she is so proud of me.

I love her so much. My girlfriend, that is. I just want to say that.

“…I…te quiero.”

“Mmm-hmm. Te quiero, too.”

Oh, but the biggest lie—the one I pretend to be cynical about in order to sustain my image of being a modern thinker—that lie … that one is about the “s” word.

Oh … god.

“Do you think she’s your soulmate?” my girlfriend sometimes asks me, usually whenever she’s not holding me but is instead angry at me. Or sometimes that question is an accusation snarled at me by this woman’s boyfriend of eight years who, by the way, frequently messages me to tell me that he absolutely and thoroughly hates me.

That question, no matter who invokes it, causes me to back away slowly, as if answering it might accidentally reveal the awful truth that, yes, I have feelings for her … as if the question were three velociraptors.

When my girlfriend asks me, I am eager to remind her that she and she alone is my one, true rock.

I reminisce about facing the world together with her. We are hand-in-hand, having forged a sixth sense deep within both of us, one with the sole purpose of knowing what the other one is feeling. Though our personalities are often anachronistic, we are perpetually in concert. We are comforted in any scenario by just our mere presence, always giggly because we know what the other is always thinking, attracted to each other in mind and in body.

I don’t believe in the concept of a soulmate. But if I did, what is one if not that?

I often practice saying that last line in my head while hugging a pillow where her breasts sometimes are, and would still be if I hadn’t upset her, setting her off to some other part of the house. It sounds really good.

“In my many years of practice and schooling and observation, my personal opinion is that soulmates do exist, and…”

She trails off, I think. It’s hard to concentrate when I’m crying. Why does she keep bringing that word up?

In defense of my girlfriend’s honor, I respond, “Everything I said about my girlfriend is true … and more. But with her … and I’ve never felt this way in more than 30 years about anyone else … it’s like I knew her before I knew her.”

“…that’s a soulmate.”

My therapist wins the point.

Because she is ping-pong. My co-workers are also ping-pong. Even my wonderful, beautiful, naked girlfriend is ping-pong. Why can’t I go back to when I didn’t know my mind was in constant motion?

I stare at my phone, where this other woman is blocked, and ache to be free of all protracted interactions, back to the only social situation I would never describe as one. Where communication doesn’t demand analyzing, or returning, or winning, or losing, and I can look her in the eyes (brown) when I say words. If I could only just send this text, I could feel weightlessness again with another human being.

But I guess I’ll just go back to pretending I don’t believe in soulmates though, just to be safe.

With her fingers in my hair, I will continue to lay against my naked girlfriend, who I love with all my heart, and tell her about the woman I am in love with that isn’t her.

With my black hair getting tangled, her breast holding my head up, and her demeanor holding my heart up, I am safe. Although we are new to polyamory, she still loves me no matter what I’ve done. This includes when she’s lying to me the same way I lie to her, her true feelings in a chasm far, far behind her brave, silent facade. She seems to completely understand why I am acting this bizarre way. And that’s cool.

This other woman, she remains safe, too. But her’s is a different kind of safe. It’s a safety in stability, whereas mine is a safety in vulnerability.

She messages me every few months against her boyfriend’s wishes, or I message her, and our hearts beat out of our throats. But with her not having a partner who holds her in bed while she talks about breaking up with the man she never dated, she has to eventually revert back to her own safety. There, things do not fluctuate, like my head moving up and down. She is in her room, and I am in mine.

With the woman I love gone, lately I’ve been in my bed with my girlfriend, safe. And I love her.