Right now none of us are living in the same city.

Alex is in Spokane Washington working on Znation and is gone six months out of the year, Jon got a job as a reporter at a newspaper in Bakersfield and is only home on the weekends, and I am here, in LA, keeping our house safe for my men.

It is a strange time. It has offered me a lot of time to sit and think. To read and to write.

It has been unbearably hot in LA. The nights burn. The sun is inescapable in that cloudless, endlessly blue skied, LA way. I have found myself crying over things that people don’t cry over. Sometimes out of sadness, sometimes because I am so overwhelmed with joy: I can’t seem to make it all the way through a half hour TV show without crying at least two times. It’s become kind of embarrassing.

I have no idea why I am crying so much.

In November Alex and I are going on our honeymoon. We are spending three and a half weeks in Europe. Berlin, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. Jon won’t be going with us. There are many reasons why this is true: it is our honeymoon, something we had planned before Jon, something that we all three feel Alex and I need to do: but also Jon got this new job. A good job. A job that is exactly what he wanted to be doing: this is something I realize now that makes the three of us very lucky: we each have found a way to do exactly what we’ve always wanted to do: we are each living the lives we wanted to be living.

I am going to miss Jon while we are gone. A lot. I am going to miss his strange and awkward facial expressions, his startlingly handsome smile: how he goes from total book geek to super model in a matter of seconds. A friend of mine recently said, “Jon is so unassuming, so quiet, that sometimes it’s like he isn’t there, and then he will say something or do something so small and charming, and he will smile, and you are taken aback by how handsome and gentle and beautiful he is.” This is true. This is exactly true.

Sometimes, when Jon is home and Alex is still away, in Spokane, I lay next to Jon, my hand on his back, feeling him breath, and I love him so much while simultaneously missing Alex to the point of it hurting.

I am amazed at how all these things can exist simultaneously. An infinite array of feelings happening at once. It makes me wonder about our complexities: about what it means to be human.

And while I will miss Jon, while I know there will be nights when I will lay in Alex’s arms and feel his love, the completeness of him surrounding me, I will also feel the loss of Jon: the pain of his not being there: and I will also be happy. I know that I will experience the amazing adventure with Alex and I will experience the pain of not having Jon by our side at the same time. Both will exist. Both will be true.

I recently had a dream. I am walking through a wide open field. It is dark out. The moon hangs low and full in the sky. A light fog moves over the ground, coming to my knees. In the distance I can see the sparkling lights of a large house: warm and bright: inviting. As I walk up the path to the front door I hear voices: a vast tapestry of the same voices all happening at the same time: each distinct, each it’s own pattern, it’s own story: a hundred different variations of three voices: and I knew what each one was saying: as if they were brightly lit before me, burning streams leading off into different directions.

Inside the house I walk through rooms: each a completely different world, a different experience: Jon and Alex and I, sitting on the floor, or at a table, or in bed, talking and laughing and fighting and fucking and cooking dinner and making plans: all of this happening in each room I entered: all of it happening at once: and I could taste the flavors of the emotions in the air, I could see the colors surrounding us, the beating of our hearts, the way the blood moved in our veins: the small lines carved into our skin, the maps of our existence: I could see the fullness and the depth: I could see it all.

When I woke up the next morning I felt something had been given to me: a gift that, while beautiful, I wouldn’t exactly be able to use: the kind of gift that is marvelous and perfect and yet strangely impractical.

In September Alex came home for a three day weekend. His mother was here too. She had sold her house in Huntington Beach and was moving to New Mexico for a new job. This was the house Alex had grown up in. So many things were happening, it was layered and complex: his child hood home was being sold, his mother was moving away, Jon and I were here in LA, life was moving forward and he felt like it was all happening without him, away from him. The weekend was hard. For everybody. I can’t exactly put my finger on it: for me, I know, I am not good when people are sad or sick or scared. It terrifies me. I want to break things and rage: I want to destroy everything back to being okay.

This is not always a helpful approach. I know that.

When we brought Alex to the airport after the weekend, I sat in the car, watching him: he stood there, people moving past him, crying, looking at us as we drove away: lost. I have never known exactly that pain before. There was nothing I could. Nothing I could say. Nothing I could offer to make him feel any better.

I was just a witness to his life.

I think sometimes that is all any of us can be. Witnesses. To each other. To life.

A few nights ago I found myself sitting in the middle of my living room, our living room, alone: it was late, after two in the morning, and I was crying. I can’t tell you why. I just felt afraid. I felt lost.   I felt hopeless.

I felt powerless. Over everything. Again, I was a witness, only now it was to myself.

After a few minutes I stood up and I started talking, out loud, to the air and the house: to the room: to the future. I believe there are things that listen to us. I’m not sure there is anything they can do, but it is comforting to me. And after a while I went to sleep and when I woke up there was a stream of text messages in our threeway group chat. Stupid things, meaningless little things:

“Babies! Are you awake yet?”

“I’m awake! I don’t want to be! I want to be in bed with my loves!”

“You will be! Soon!”

“Do you promise!”

“I promise!!!”

“Baby what are you doing?”

“I’m at work.” A picture arrives of a prosthetic zombie body, painted to look bloodied and decaying.

“Baby! That is so cool! You have the coolest job ever!”

“No baby!”

“Yes baby. It’s true. You are the coolest ever.”

“What are you doing, baby?”

“I’m at work. I was given a new assignment today so I’m researching story leads. It’s hot here.”

And then me: “Babies!!!! I’ve awaken!”

“Baby that is so beautiful!”
“Shut up baby! You are so beautiful!”

And I get out of bed and I play with Paco and the cats and make coffee and I consider writing or reading, maybe the gym, reading texts from Alex and Jon, going through my day: a witness to our life.

I will miss Jon when we are gone. I have missed Alex every day for six months. And I will love being alone with my husband, traveling and having adventures, and I have loved the quiet times Jon and I have had together, watching TV and holding hands on the couch, and I will love the three of us, lying in bed, whispering to each other, our hands touching, my belly pressed into the small of Jon’s back, Alex’s hand wrapped over Jon and onto me.

It’s okay that we aren’t all together right now. Even in my loneliest moments I know that: because we are living our lives and we are encouraging each other to move forward, supporting each other. I want them both with me here always, but more than that I want them to live the biggest lives they can, even if it means I can’t have them next to me: even if it means I have to lose them for a while: because it is only temporary. It is only circumstantial.

And then we will all be home again. Together.