“I remember this photo,” I said aloud to myself when I found it under some papers in my desk drawer. It was taken, what, four or five years ago at Golden Gate Park. We sure did look like a happy group, didn’t we?

That’s me playing the guitar. And the girl resting her head on my thigh, that’s Jessica. Back then I was sure she was my soulmate. Danny and Donny, who are cousins, are the bookends in this photo. Danny was sitting next to me on my right. Donny, on the right in the photo, was married to Diana, the girl in the wide-rimmed straw hat who was sitting to my left. We called ourselves the “Five Musketeers” because we were inseparable and did everything together.

Danny was the fifth wheel or the fifth column or whatever that expression is for the odd man out. I was paired up with Jessica and Donny was married to Diana. But Danny was always alone. Despite his broad smile in the photo, he was a very unhappy kid.

It was probably a few months after this photo was taken that Donny and Diana got divorced. He found out that his wife and my alleged soulmate were having a lesbian relationship. He simply could not abide by that and convinced his cousin, Danny, to move out of state. They ended up in Texas, started a very successful house-flipping business together, and are now both very wealthy.

That left three of us, me, my soulmate Jessica and her lesbian lover, the newly divorced Diana. When Donny told me about Jessica and Diana, I was devastated and I confronted Jessica. “Is it true about you and Diana?” I asked. She admitted it was.

I told her I was breaking up with her, but she thought that dangling a three-way relationship with her and Diana might tempt me to stay. “You and I can have sex together. You and Diana can have sex together. Diana and I can have sex together. And the three of us can all have sex together. How does that sound?” she asked.

It sounded great to me, and it was great for a while. But it soon became evident that both Jessica and Diane wanted to be with each other more than either wanted to be with me. So I graciously left the two of them alone and I heard they got married last year.

Seeing this photo brought back a lot of fond memories, but it also saddened me that the Five Musketeers, once so close and virtually inseparable, had drifted apart and were no longer even friends.

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Written for Christine Bialczak’s Simply 6 Minutes Challenge. Image credit: no attribution.