Witnesses are the only people who can set you free, and cultivating them takes labor.

You stole labor from me, which is a huge deal. I am so tired, you guys, and now, my ability to depend on Tony is compromised.

I had known Tony for five years before you. He saw me through the death of my good grandmother; the beginning of my breakup with Kevin in 2012; my brother’s wedding and his move to Denver; my first HIV scare from a one-night stand; the actual beginnings of my estrangement because of the wedding.

All of these things are really hard to understand, and developing that understanding takes a lot of traumatizing conversations — that doing over the course of days, months, years gives me freedom to live. It allows me to be in the company of people that know how to accommodate the effects of so many of the traumas that the world has enacted upon me.

Tony understood these hard things, and he let me be free from them and the certainty of death that lay outside the door to his house.

You have no idea how violent my life has been. This family shit I talk about is not something you will equate to high school girls notes in the back of each others’ senior yearbooks. This structure that I am modeling, testing, building with you guys — it is at, its root, a survival mechanism. I need this family for my continued existence.

Tony was a safe space because he saw me and gave me a place I could be gay. I made sure to always show up and see him, to talk to him about what he needs, so I can structure the space that I control accommodate the effects of so many of the traumas that the world has enacted upon him.

Together, we could implicitly try to set each other free — and freedom looks like a kind of fun that doesn’t require you watch out for trailing baseball bats.

His and my friendship stopped being about me a long time ago, and, I would hope you remember a lot of my writing to you this year, that a lot of really awful shit happened to me again this year.That is five years of showing up for Tony that I have lost. That is a nuanced safe space I no longer retain. He’s loved Greg from the moment I introduced him, the collective pursuit you three made over the last year was paid at my expense.

And I had a lot of really bad feelings about it:

Dated Jan 1, 2018:

A hypothetical letter I had written but never sent to Greg that day. My mom and dad would move to Denver two days later. I could not risk rocking the boat, scaring you both off, as I was absolutely poised for incoming trauma.

You had unfair power over me.

You knew this would hurt me, and you did it anyway — explaining to me the vow of silence everyone took against us. When I talked about it today with Kevin, his reaction was this: “We were either deemed not important enough to be told of a significant and exciting development in all of your lives, or it was coordinated deception against us, done over the course of 7 months.”

Either way, you chose to destabilize us, right now and in this instant.

Kevin and I need safety and stability, first and foremost, and that can only be done with a stable community. You chose to alienate us for the same extended duration that we were giving you complete access. For this to work there needs to be parity. I will not fly blind of any and all capacities for our collective dynamic. You have to understand how dangerous that is for me, and, if you love me, you will respect that by giving me your complete presence. The only adequate way I can know I can trust you is to see every part of you, all the time, so I can determine the best way to leverage your role in our safety.

The creation of my chosen family is a response to the complete physical and emotional violence outside the family’s borders. It cannot be viewed outside of the danger Kev and I face daily, nor viewed outside of the estrangement process we only very recently underwent.

I am currently examining all of my existing relationships and how they responded during these past few years where I had absolutely no power. I took notes of who abused what opportunities, so we can talk about it now. My entire well being was dependent on you in 2017 and 2018, and there are a lot of instances where stuff happened that we had no choice but to bear.

I guarantee, this is a real opportunity to be redeemed, so you both can be there with Kevin and me as we begin the first life of our choosing. We want that more than anything. We love you both more than ~anyone~ else in the world. That is a fact.

A love that took a lot of labor when resources were scarce.

We are so tired, you guys.

I need to know every other way you broke faith with us, so I can tell you what impact it had and to also hear why you made that decision. I need to know for next time my entire world crashes, so I don’t depend on you in the same way I depended on the Kuhns. I didn’t check my safety net last time — not in 28 years — so I didn’t know it had become moldy and rotted until I began my 20,000 ft free fall from GOES-R. I will never again depend on someone who won’t catch me; who tells me he’s watching me but is , instead, using me to begin an eight-month sexual relationship with the boy who just told me he loved me three months prior.

An eight-month sexual relationship that my three best friends swore an oath of silence

You lied to us — our every day, our every conversation.

You compromised my old best friend in a way where I can never trust him again. I won’t do the labor of making him feel better about treating me like garbage, because I deserve better than that.

Being a citizen of my family is employment. There are obligations and expectations, rules and reward. If you both cannot comply, we need to go our separate ways right now.

The stakes for this family are so much higher for Kevin and us in this thing, but I refuse to let that give you unfair power over us. You will consider me in the ways we consider you. If we include your voice in choosing the bedroom that Kevin and I will be spending the next year in, I expect you to consider the ways that your bedroom could make us physically unsafe by damaging our support ecosystem..

You are not allowed to compromise the infrastructure of mine and Kevin’s life, for any reason.

There will be no second redemption from a broken faith, but there is one right now — so tell me everything.

I just escaped from one abusive family, and I will not escape from a second. I won’t make you feel better about treating me like garbage. Instead, I will withhold from you the spoils of and consideration in my daily labor of family.

This could be something amazing, guys, and I hope you will commit to the labor of making this dream a reality.

I love you so much.

Kevin does, too.

You’re both our North Stars.

******

I hope you can piece together contextually why the origin story of G+J+T is hard for to feel good about for me.

Aug 17: Greg tells me he loves me.

Oct 1: Laid Off

Dec 31: Greg and Tony very nearly make out in my presence. I leave in discomfort, with no impact on the situation.

Jan 3: My parents move to Denver.

This started, visibly, when I was in the midst of intense trauma. I had one less person to depend on — because of your decisions and your deception.

Please tell me a story about this that makes me feel better.

****

To be compared with:

“Tony, I drove an hour to bring you a crowd on your race day.”