Twenty-four names. I scrolled through every user account on this site and enabled twenty-four of them, one by one, each time asking myself if I felt like I could trust this person with my life. Maybe that's making too much of it.

Yes and no, I think.

It should be simple, who I love and what capacity they hold in my life, but the reality of where I live dictates otherwise. Twenty-four names. More sobering than that is the tally I ran a moment ago: only three of those people live in my home state (or my home time zone for that matter). One of those three I'm married to. The schism in my friends is as deep as it is absolute, and I think I wanted to have private entries on this site again just so I could say this: it wears on me, and it makes me sad.

There have been people in my life that I have loved and cared about deeply, and this site has become gradually more dishonest over the past few years as I have continued not acknowledging their passage through my life. Over the past year, I've watched a longtime partner of mine make hard decisions about his life. He and his spouse have both decided that it was time to stop pretending they were something they weren't; if their friends couldn't handle knowing they were poly, they needed to shut the hell up and take their friendship elsewhere. That is not currently a luxury I have.

For the time being, I'll settle for being able to write honestly on my website again.