I’m curled up on the sofa, a mug of herbal tea warming my hands. Jason is in the kitchen, humming off to some song...and for the tenth time in the last two months, I exhale a sigh of pure, unadulterated peace.

Two months. That’s how long it’s been since I packed an overnight bag that somehow morphed into a semi-permanent residence here, in Jason’s apartment. My head remembers the rationale: a temporary break, a way to “minimize the constant frictions” with Dan. My heart, though, knows it was a break from the constant tension, the unspoken accusations, the way the air between us would thicken into something suffocating if we weren't actively fighting. Jason, is my university friend, so it wasn't a stranger I ran to. He’s known to Dan, too, which somehow makes it… an arrangement, I guess? A very convenient one.

Yes, I sleep with Jason. It wasn't planned, not really. It just… happened. One night, after too much talk about everything but Dan, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. And it continues to feel natural. There’s a warmth, a companionship that fills the spaces Dan and I left empty. Dan knows. We don't have explicit conversations about it, not really. It’s all "allusions," veiled comments about my "new routine," or his "quiet evenings." A strange dance, but a clear one.

I still visit Dan, of course. “To keep it a relationship as much as possible,” I tell myself. And him. We have dinner, watch a movie – usually one I pick these days. His habit of watching porn and movies, endlessly, was one of the big, festering sores that started this whole mess. It’s like he’s built a wall of screens around himself, and I was just another piece of furniture in the room. I’d try to talk, to connect, and his eyes would just glaze over, fixed on some pixelated fantasy or explosion. It annoyed me then, and it still does during visits. It’s a dismissal, an erasure.

It’s ironic, really. We’re both on the swinging site. We both chat, once in a while. It was meant to be this adventurous step, a way to inject life, to explore, to maybe even reconnect by sharing something new. Instead, it feels like another symptom of the disconnect. This site was supposed to open us up, but things happen....I guess.

With Jason, there’s easy conversation, shared laughter, a quiet respect for each other’s space. He doesn’t fill every silence with background noise; sometimes, he just is. That’s a luxury I hadn’t realized I’d been craving for so long. It’s a relief, yes, but it’s also… complicated. There’s a lingering guilt when I think of Dan, alone in our apartment, surrounded by his screens and his silence. But then I remember the arguments, the emptiness, the feeling of being utterly invisible when I was right there beside him, and the guilt recedes, replaced by a weary resignation.

So, here I am. Living a double life, but not really (Dan knows I was going to write something about all of this). More like a fractured life, trying to piece together where I belong. The swinging site felt like a place for freedom, for honesty, for exploring desires without judgment. And in a way, my life now is that – honest in its emotional complexity, free in its current arrangement, messy in its reality. It's just... not exactly the adventure I signed up for. It’s just life, I guess. And life, it turns out, is a lot more nuanced than a profile page. And to Dan, I'm here as I always as.