So it goes

            The first time I thought I was gay I was nine.

            I would look at older women walking down the street and I’d stare at their bodies and marvel at their faces, craving for them. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to touch them or simply be them.

            I remember sitting in the tree in my front yard, the first time I could actually find the courage to climb it. I sat at the top and watched the cars drive by. I thought about girls, but I never thought the word gay. That word didn’t exist. I just thought of girls and their bodies and I feared the difference between jealousy and infatuation.  

            I went to summer camp when I was 10. There was this girl there, whose name I never learned, but her blonde hair was made of honey and dreams. Her skin glowing from the sun, her legs toned from playing sports, she was everything I envied. She was everything I wanted.

        The first time I almost kissed a girl was in seventh grade. My friend Katelynn told me she was bi and I told her I wanted to find out if I was. At a football game, she took me to the bathroom and we stood in the handicapped stall and I thought maybe I’m handicapped and maybe I’m gay and what if I’m not?

            I kept laughing every time she came close. I laughed at the way her lips made me shake and the way she smelled like the salt of the ocean. I laughed to starve the fear growing in me, but I couldn’t stop it. We didn’t kiss. I walked away, pretending it was a joke.

         The first time I kissed a girl I was sixteen and drunk. She was drunk too, she said. She tasted like sugar and cheese, but her lips were soft and her eyelids drooped. I didn’t know who I was. I was dating a guy named Caleb at the time. He thought it was funny when I told him, until he asked did you kiss her back and I rolled my eyes until I thought about that question. Maybe I did kiss her back, but maybe I just stood there and wondered about the space in between two sets of lips, thinking about what love really is.

            My best friend Sam and I used to say that if we were going to kiss a girl, we would be each other’s first kiss. Well, I kissed the girl at the party and somewhere along the way Sam kissed someone, surely, but I never told Sam that I regretted not kissing her first. I still was confused on the “feelings” versus “envy” dilemma and I didn’t need to keep kissing girls if I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted.

            One time Sam and I shot gunned hookah smoke together, which is like a tease where you almost kiss, but don’t. You can smell that person and feel their presence but you don’t get to enjoy their lips or their tongue. It’s like kissing a ghost. That was the closest I ever got to kissing Sam.

        Then there was Mary. I met her in ninth grade. Sometimes these girls intertwine with each other because sometimes I meet someone and I think maybe I’ll kiss her, but then it doesn’t happen for years and sometimes it happens within seconds that feel like years. You never know because girls are really the most interesting people I’ve ever met. There was a flame in her that made me want to make her laugh and hold her hand and kiss her even though I was terrified and shoved those feelings down because I was dating someone and could never accept those feelings as the truth. One day, we went to a movie. I sat there, thinking about her hand and what it would feel like to hold it and what her skin tasted like and if her voice in my ear would solve all the doubt crammed inside my head.

            At prom my junior year, I finally kissed Mary. Twice. Once at the actual prom, while I was dancing with a friend and she was dancing with her date. We leaned across the space between us like we couldn’t wait to touch each other and we kissed. Her arms on mine stopped the shaking in my body. I taste her smile on her lips and I hoped to God she wasn’t laughing at me, but at the ecstasy of our kiss.

            The next morning, Mary told Sam, but she didn’t believe us. I secretly hoped Sam was jealous and would kiss me too. Mary leaned over the couch I was sitting on and pulled on my chin, looking into my eyes with such passion I felt unworthy to even hold her gaze. She kissed me and when she pulled away, laughing, she said, “See! Now I’ve kissed every girl in our group!” I was a checklist. I was not her Juliet or lips that made her glow. I was the last kiss on her bucket list. You see, Mary was a full-blown lesbian and everyone knew. To her, kissing another girl was no problem. Mary was so out and above everyone else while I just felt very cut in half because part of me loves muscles and being protected and the other half wants to braid hair and wipe tears away. It doesn’t matter anymore, because Mary moved to Texas after senior year. I feel like she sucked something out of me and now I can’t stop feeling very cut open and dried up.

*

My freshman year of college, I cheated on my boyfriend with his permission.

I thought that I could experiment in college and find out whether or not I’m 100% or 50% or maybe just 2% but I didn’t like the idea of relating myself to milk. I’d rather be all in or all out. I was worried because I didn’t want to come out completely in college but there’s no way to put up flyers that say: I’m kind of maybe thinking about trying out gay but I’m not exactly even kind of sure about that. I didn’t want to be fickle or confused; I just wanted to be me and to accept that.

            Her name was Hayley Wright.

            She was in my Intro to Creative Writing class and when she turned in a workshop piece detailing a night where she was intoxicated with the thought of kissing a girl downtown, I was enraptured. I remember reading the piece and falling in love with every word and finding, again and again, how I wanted to swallow every sentence on the page. When I emailed her telling her how much I loved her piece, I couldn’t ignore the slight twist in my stomach when she emailed me back. After a few emails, she gave me her number and I remember it: sitting in my dorm room, alone, smiling and blushing at ten digits that meant nothing at all, but at the same time, everything.

            We avoided eye contact during class, even though I knew she was looking when I wasn’t, and she surely knew I was doing the same. I would text her during class just to watch her face when she read my words. I wanted to see her smile and know that it was because of me. I ignored the voice in my head reminding me of my boyfriend. This was harmless, I told myself. I knew it had gone on too far when I told my roommate about her as if I were telling her about a cute boy I met. She stopped me mid sentence as I was telling her how Hayley had given me her number: “I think it’s weird. You have a boyfriend.” Then she promptly changed the subject. She was right. I knew I was out of place, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to know this girl. I wanted to kiss her and listen to her voice. I wanted to kiss her eyelids and her fingertips.

            I called my boyfriend and told him, slightly drunk for courage. He seemed oddly distant. Now, I know his silence was anger and confusion. His girlfriend had a crush on a girl. He was never against experimenting with sexuality, but he just had never had doubts. How do you explain the color red to someone who cannot see? I explained as best I could and he told me, “Kiss her. If this helps you clear things up and it would make being with me easier, then do it. Just don’t tell me about it afterwards.” I felt like a girl getting permission from her parents to do something dangerous with her friends. I felt like I was in a zoo and my boyfriend had left the cage door open.

 

We went to a party. I drank too much because I was nervous and she was so close but still too far away. I wanted to twist my fingers in her hair, feel the gasp in her mouth as I kissed her, run my hands down her waist until she was closer than air to me.

            We were playing beer pong when she grabbed me and kissed me. We were in front of a bunch of guys and I was upset that our first kiss was shared with the drunken population. When I told her this, she grabbed my hand and pulled me to the side of the house, as private as you can be at a party with your whole school there. When her lips met mine, I paid more attention; I let my teeth hold her bottom lip and my tongue taste her mouth. I tasted whiskey and desire. She started pulling on my bra and I let her. She ran her tongue over my chest and I let her. She moaned and I wanted more. I wanted her.

Then the whistling started. A drunk guy, who had to piss, had taken refuge in the woods next to us. He whistled and jeered, calling his gang over to watch. I hadn’t noticed at first; I was memorized by Hayley’s mouth and her fingers on my skin, screaming under her touch. She pushed me off of her and yelled to the boys, in her slurred voice, “F**k you! F**K YOU!” A cop car pulled up at that exact moment, lights whirring and spinning, and the sound of the sirens alerting my body to move. I grabbed Hayley’s hand and we ran. We jumped over a fence, through a bush made of leaves and needles, and sprinted until our breathing collapsed. I laughed at her and she laughed at me and we walked back to my dorm.

            By luck, my roommate wasn’t there and Hayley and I climbed on the bed. Kissing her was being stuck in a hurricane: it’s a blur and slightly terrifying, but there is exhilaration from the adrenaline. As I started to attempt kissing every corner of her body, my boyfriend began calling me. It was late; it was very early. I picked up the third time and told him I was too drunk to talk and began to cry, because he told me I could only kiss Hayley, not touch her or fall in love with the softness of her skin, the smell of her hair. He was angry, I could tell, but for the moment I didn’t care. I faked apologies on the phone while I put my finger over Hayley’s lips, stifling her giggles.

            When Matt and I broke up a year later, whenever I saw Hayley downtown, we would always dance, and, sometimes, my lips would find hers, in the middle of the dance floor. Our hands would hold onto each other as if we never left. I would feel whole again, even if just for a moment, in the space between her body and mine.

*

I spent two months out of my summer before junior year starving and taking care of fifteen-year-old girls.

I worked as a counselor in California at a Girl Scout camp where we could choose a name for ourselves. Mine was Honey. After spending two weeks in staff training, meeting people such as Magnolia, Pickle, Roo, Thistle, and Sprite, I felt a part of something. During training, I became close to a girl named Smurf. She wasn’t enchanting or seductive like Hayley was, but I wanted her to like me. On one of our weekends off, after playing Kill/F**k/Marry, we asked Smurf her opinion: Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, Donald Trump, and Hugh Hefner. She laughed, “Well, that’s kind of difficult to answer seeing as I’m not into guys…” We all laughed it off and continued onto a different conversation, but my stomach started twisting in the same way when Hayley had sent me her number. I hadn’t even realized I felt that way about her until she suddenly became attainable. Sure, she wore boy shorts and had a boxy figure. She never put on makeup or expressed interest in our games about boys, but we also worked at a camp; no one wore nice clothes or makeup.

            During 4^th of July, I visited Berkeley with Magnolia, Roo, and Oatmeal. Smurf and I had been texting during the weekend off. One night, I had a dream that I had tried to kiss her, but she pulled away. When I woke up, my grand idea was to text this to her with a plethora of “lol”s afterwards. I wanted to know her reaction, but also didn’t want her to directly know I was slightly crushing on her. She laughed it off too, saying, “Well, that would never happen, because I know for a fact that you’re straight and have a boyfriend.” After correcting her on both matters, I was nervous, awaiting her reply. I kept thinking she wasn’t even interested in me so there was no point in even texting her about my stupid dream. It was a crush. A camp crush, how typical.

            After smoothing over my awkwardness, we had a normal conversation about sexuality with no mention of my dream about her. When everyone returned to camp, some of the staff members had to leave on the busses to pick up the campers. They would be out of camp for the night. Since my unit was just my co-counselor and I, I was the only one left in my unit. The same thing happened for Smurf. We decided to share a tent because we were in the middle of the woods and camp was a little creepy at night without any lights.

            We stayed up talking until two in the morning. I told her about the girls I had kissed, she told me she was in love with her best friend. She went to a Woman’s College in Massachusetts and played field hockey. She had never kissed a boy before. She cried when she realized she was gay. She told her sister by leaving her a note on her bed.

            At 3 am, I crawled into her sleeping bag with her and she told me, “I’m so curious. I don’t want to regret not kissing you.” I pulled her towards me and we collapsed into each other. She was on top of me, kissing and touching. I couldn’t stop breathing her in. We were at camp and we hadn’t showered in days, but it didn’t matter. She smelled like campfire and her lips warmed my body in ways I had only dreamed of all summer. We fell asleep, tangled, her breath on the back of my neck.

 

I have no idea what my sexuality is. I used to think that I was broken or ridiculous as others around me held up their signs: I’m gay! Or I’m bisexual! While I stood, without a label, feeling lost and worthless. I thought having a label would define me. Then I realized, sexuality can be anything to anyone, but most importantly, it defines you as you define it. And of course, there are days when I fall into this hole of not knowing who I am and the people surrounding me, strutting their labels with pride, seem to be laughing at my lack of definition. There are days when I can’t speak, because my voice is stolen away by my passion for love. But I find that those days are what I need. I need the days where I break down and force myself to define myself, even the most limitless parts of myself.

            Some days I just forget myself and I realize how upside down the world really is, demanding a label for something as fluid as human emotions. On these days, I say to myself it’s okay. Really, it is.