A Childhood Want

Suntop, Skywise, Cutter, Leetah, and Ember all sleeping

If I was to think back to when I had my first experience with poly in any form, I would have to say that it went back to when I was in middle school. My friends were just getting into Elfquest. It was something so very new. My mom wouldn’t let me read comics when I was a kid because they were evil or something. In all fairness, I have no idea why they were considered so bad. The storylines at that point were still fairly simplistic.

There were three characters that shared a loving V relationship. They are Cutter, Skywise, and Leetah. The connection point between Leetah and Skywise is Cutter as he’s the one with the intimate relationship with the other two.

I didn’t realize how profoundly the image of the three of them sleeping was for me. After all, I never had that closeness when I was younger, despite how much I wanted to feel like people wanted to be close to people.

There was something comforting about the relationship between the three of them, that just made me feel… I don’t know… comforted. I think that would be the most accurate, especially because at that point in my life, I didn’t even have a good place when I was home with my birth family.

It’s funny, because I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to have a warm and loving family. I didn’t really have that experience when I was a child. A majority of my childhood was chaos and anger and fear. It was everything that you would never want to have as a child. Looking at a picture of Leetah, Cutter, and Skywise sleeping peacefully with Leetah and Cutter’s children…

It’s something that I desired when I was a child. It’s never something I really experienced nor do I have a conscious moment of when I was younger. There was a lot of anger, pain, and fighting… but never a sense of peace of serenity. Never a sense of what I hear is supposed to be what it means to be in a family. The strife that I dealt with when I was younger has made me a bit more standoffish than I think anyone should be.

Life does seem to have a way of righting itself some of the time. While chaos will always be a part of life (as much as I dislike it), It is possible for things to right themselves. The peace that I saw in that picture, the love that I saw in that relationship… that seems to be within reach. I keep hoping and waiting patiently to have that an image like that of my own… and it’s possible that maybe I can have that family. It’s certainly something that I want more than anything. I want to have in my adulthood all the things that my childhood never presented me. I want constancy. I want a warm and loving environment. I want people who will actually love me, make me feel like I’m loved regardless.

All it took was a simple picture of three people sharing a loving moment…