Weirdly, love triangles do exist.
But they're rarely equilateral.
Or, if isosceles,
some confusion abounds,
each point considering itself the vertex.
In 1980
I loved Billie who loved Terry who
loved me.
Not that I knew.
In 1980
I saw only three configurations:
A line segment
And I a point above or below it.
An angle, three-pointed,
with Billie the vertex.
A straight line -- one-eighty degrees
With Billie in the middle
the starting and ending point
of Terry and me at our farthest ends.
We spoke often
always on the other side of the vertex
that was Billie.
Terry nicknamed me
"Zhaji doll"
and the name stuck.
He'd roll his eyes
at what he called my innocence,
shake his head at my Bible-reading.
Often I would look up
to find the inscrutable eyes of
this twenty-something gay
prematurely-gray
white man
whom twenty-year-old Billie
loved so so much.
Often I sensed I was studied
assessed
then marked as failed.
I feared his actue wit.
Although its sharp lance never pierced me
as it stabbed or gutted others.
It was only later that
I saw the falsity of all my theoroms
And this truth was so subtly told.
More subtle and heart-breaking
than any other gift
I would ever receive.
On the last day of college,
Terry arrived in my dorm room.
A thing he had never done.
Who was I that the
gay icon
of our college should visit me?
He walked toward the picture window
and stood in silence
watching the grassy courtyard.
Five minutes or more
he stood
silent.
Several times he opened his mouth
turned to speak, but sighing, said nothing.
Then at last, as if some thought had solidified in his mind
he turned and left.
That was the last I saw him
until news came
thirty years later
that he had died
I later learned that
we were a
three-sided
open polygon.
And that he had loved me
That he feared
dragging me into
his life
with its continued rounds
of mental hospital stays
that he feared
I was too fragile
and would crumble
in a relationship with
"an insane bisexual man,"
That he did not speak his love
because he did not wish to harm me.
I often look back at that wordless visit
that spoke so much.
wishing
he had summoned up the courage
to trust his fragile Zhaji doll.
We could've been happy,
I think.
I married sanely
I married logically.
I married well
But not happily.
We humans, live blind.
Love blinds us, or logic.
And lacking foresight,
even at our apex we are obtuse.
So the triangle existed
in its own human way.
There is so much that our postulates
and theorems can never guess or know.
