by Edwin Okolo

Last night, for the first time in five years I took time to explain what it meant to be polyamorous.

Flushed with spirits and happiness, with the need to run my fingers through your hair, I felt myself burble like a fountain, explaining to this tiny, 5 foot 7 stranger in low rise jeans and a ponytail who I’d met knocking back in free vodka tonics at a fashion party, how I’d cut off parts of myself because of my first great love Paternak. Maybe it was being 300 miles away from everyone I know, or the beguiling lure of new beginnings, whatever it was, it gutted me open.

You laughed at the faux British accent which poured out of me as the vodka tonics poured in, and urged that I explain exactly what had happened. The conversation that had led us here started simply enough, over empty glasses. We’d spent the evening skirting around the shoals of prettily dressed people drowning in conversation. We watched for each other, coming up for air at the bar and its french mixologist, refusing to return to the shoals after a third meeting. The dark of your eyes held nebulae and I read portents for my future in them, one where your nights were enlivened by my hands and my mouth.

“Tell me,” you said, “what were your exact words?”

I sighed, annoyed that the events of that afternoon hadn’t eroded into unimportant relief, unremarkable beside the new topography the tectonics of this evening was raising in my memories.

“I told Paternak,” I said to you, slowing so I didn’t slur my words, “there is someone else, I think you should know. I can’t choose, not because I don’t know who I want more, but because I don’t think I should have to choose.”

In hindsight I was a jerk, I know that now; polyamory isn’t the kind of thing you lay on the table when you’re in the mysterious beginnings of a new love, that kind of uncertainty haunts a relationship. But back then I was sure monogamy was not in the cards for me. On that count I was also wrong.

You took my hand, held it up so the mood lights strung over the patio bathed it. There was a pale band at the base of the second finger right above the knuckle, a memento from wearing Khare’s promise ring for three years.

‘The people who have loved you have left their mark on you.’

I smiled, neither confirming or denying. But you cut through the morass of mysteriousness I had swaddled myself in. After the spectacular unraveling of the thing Paternak and I had built, a thing that had started cased in immaturity and juvenile expectations, all I had was attention. Khare demanded all of it. Monogamy wasn’t something we decided on, there just wasn’t time for anything or anyone else. Sometimes I was Venus, turned toxic from orbiting too close to so bright a sun, other times I was Pluto, only barely in orbit, only barely a star. But a thousand times over I preferred that to being the sun. Khare was like the Earth, in constant need. I could scarcely look away. I explained this to you, rambling as I am wont to do. You straightened your spine, rising till you’re en pointe, betraying professional dance classes, to whisper in my ear.

“I’m tempted to ask you to shut up and kiss me.”

“But Rei, you have a boyfriend.”

You smirk. “I know.”

As I watched you worked the room, tinkling laugh and swishing hair, I wondered if it would be so bad, to wade into the uncertainty of triages and shadow loves. My mulling was only a formality, by the time you flit back to me, two had already become three.

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“Portents draws on a confessional approach to non fiction championed by Keside Anosike. You can find his work at @KecyFA on Instagram”

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Edwin writes to explore concepts that he seeks to understand but cannot directly experience because of gender and genetics. He used to run the experimental fiction column ‘The Alchemist’s Corner’ and created the YA series Seams at The Naked Convos and serves as a fiction editor at Stories NG. He has written for Thelonelycrowd, Sable Lit Mag, Omenana and the Kalahari Review and was longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize. He is obsessed with children, cats and Paternak, exactly in that order.