Little Thoughts

I was nine, sitting in the tree in my front yard, thinking about women.

               I never thought the word gay, only that I would look at older women walking down the street and I’d stare at their bodies and marvel at their faces. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to touch them or simply be them.

Gay.

That word didn’t exist. I just thought of girls and their bodies and I feared the difference between jealousy and infatuation.  

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               I went to summer camp when I was ten. 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 and 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 something's wrong with me 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 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 a girl kissed me, 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. One time, we shotgunned 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.

       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. All I know is that 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 we were both dancing with our dates. 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 tasted the smile on her lips and I hoped to God she wasn’t laughing at me.

          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 pulled away, laughing.

“See! Now I’ve kissed every girl in our group!” She said.

I was a checklist.

I was not anything to her, anything at all. 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. 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.

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

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 by 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, taste her words on my tongue.

When I emailed her telling her how much I loved her piece, I couldn’t ignore the slight twist in my stomach, anxious for a reply as simple as “Thanks.”

A new email came through and I stared at her name vibrating slightly on my computer screen -- a name of small letters that made my body hurt. After a few emails, she gave me her number and I remember sitting in my dorm room, alone, smiling at ten digits that meant nothing at all, but at the same time, everything.

I was out of place; I was out of place. I knew it and I kept going. 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 couldn’t stop. My boyfriend’s face faded from my mind, replaced with her -- her pale, pale skin. This is harmless, I told myself. But still, I didn’t stop. I wanted to know this girl. I wanted to search the island that was her body and find the scrapes and cuts where her memories laid. I drove myself crazy thinking of the taste of her scars, the taste of her pain. The feel of her fingertips on my ribcage haunted my dreams until I woke, sweating in the darkness, hearing nothing but her quiet voice.

I called my boyfriend and told him, slightly drunk for courage. I explained as best I could without hurting him and he told me, “Kiss her. If this makes being with me easier, then do it. Just don’t tell me about it afterwards.” 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 pulled her to me, run my hands down her waist until she was closer to me than air.

We were playing beer pong when she grabbed me, kissed me. It was over before I even knew where I was. She took my hand and pulled me to the side of the house, as private as you can be at a party. When her lips met mine, I paid more attention; I let my teeth hold her bottom lip, carefully, afraid she would break if I let go. I tasted something hidden behind those lips. She started pulling on my bra and I let her. She ran her tongue over my chest and I let her. She took ahold of me and I let her.

Then the whistling started. A drunken guy needing to relieve himself 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 mesmerized 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!”

Lights appeared suddenly, whirring and spinning, and the sound of the sirens alerted my body to move. I grabbed Hayley’s hand and we ran. We jumped over a fence, through the bushes, and sprinted until our breathing came out choppy like heartbeats. I laughed at her and she laughed at me, standing in the street, our shirt buttons flung open like wings.

But years passed and Hayley became cruel. She knew I was weak for her, even still. And when we were downtown, she would make sure I was looking when she kissed girls. When she straddled them, whispered in their ears, made them turn towards me and laugh. She would stare at me, hard, knowing I wouldn’t do anything about it. And then, one night when she had exhausted her puppets, she approached me. I looked at her until my eyes crossed, until my vision went spotty and I was forced to blink. She grabbed my wrists, made me dance with her, took my neck between her teeth, latching on and sucking me dry. Until she said, “Stay the f**k away from me.” and pushed me off her. My head spinning, I saw her lips and hands on another girl and I swear I swallowed myself empty. The bar bathroom was my closest haven, a place I could find solace. I lied down, aching like my bones had been robbed, and felt the cold tile, warmer than she ever would be. I tried not to vomit, not to scream. I only let out a small noise -- a choke, the death of a small animal I had hidden deep inside myself.

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I moved on, and years later I spent two summer months before my senior year working as a camp counselor. A camp where we could choose a name for ourselves. Mine was Honey. Hers was Smurf.

I had been casually seeing Ryan since the beginning of summer, but he was not my boyfriend. When you spend every night under the stars, imagining a person you have only known for a few weeks, you can fall in love with the stars, but think you’re falling in love with the person you’re thinking about. That is what happened with me and Ryan. I really thought I was in love and had planned to tell him the moment I found service during 4th of July, but then a strange thing happened. In the bright city lights, driving on the Golden Gate Bridge after eating lunch on a boat with my camp friends around, I felt nothing at all for him.

Years ago, the boy I cheated on for Hayley did not mentally stimulate me. He did not show interest in my writing or my personal life. Because of this, I searched out love elsewhere and that is why I had feelings for Hayley, I thought. It made sense. It was logical. I made excuses for my feelings, but I couldn’t ignore them. I realized this with Ryan. I was pulled towards Smurf before my feelings for Ryan had dissipated. I cared for them both, equally. Ryan was attentive and engaging. He did nothing wrong and still I fell for Smurf.

When we all returned to camp after our Fourth of July break, Smurf and I stayed up talking until two in the morning. We laid on the old pine they had cut down earlier in the summer. The tree was sick, they had told us. She had a virus and it was only a matter of time, they had said. It was better to kill her before she suffered. Before her disease took over, causing her large body to crash upon us, late at night. Lying on the remnants of her body, Smurf told me what it felt like to be in love. I traced the cracked wood, circled the rough edges and wondered about the age of trees, the age of love. I told her about Hayley, how she was my first love, I thought. How destroyed and afraid she left me. Smurf told me that she cried when she realized she was gay. I felt every splinter beneath my body as she said that, as if the old pine could feel, could have goosebumps, could still be alive. Smurf made me feel alive.

Eventually, we went to our tents. I felt like I had been allowed to feel for the first time on that stump. The stump big enough to hold every feeling inside both of us. I felt very open and alive out there, feeling the old pine beneath me. But inside our tents, I was afraid again. Cramped, anxious. She looked at me, illuminated by the weak light of dying lanterns.

“I’m so scared.” She said. “I don’t want to regret not kissing you.”

I knew I wanted to kiss her. I didn’t want to be afraid.

Whether I pulled her or she pulled me, all I know is we collapsed into each other. I couldn’t stop breathing her in. She smelled like campfire and her lips warmed my body so delicately I thought I would cry. I fell in love if only for a moment -- aching towards sleep, tangled, with her breath on the back of my neck, believing I could never feel ruined again.

A year later, Smurf did leave me broken and ruined. I was not in a bar bathroom, holding my chest, waiting for my breathing to somehow return to normal, but in a hotel. A hotel, waiting on some friends to get ready in the next room. A hotel, where I checked Facebook and saw she was tagged in a post. A hotel, whose Wi-Fi was not strong and loaded her obituary slowly, but not slowly enough for me to understand. To understand what it meant. To understand what they meant. A picture of her and the words “love” and “miss” and “rest in peace.” All gun shots, piercing my stupid, stupid heart for her. And, in that moment, I longed to return when my worst pain came from lying on a bar bathroom floor, crying about a girl who was not mine but, at least, alive.

And how wonderful it would be, I thought, to return to my nine-year-old self, climbing a tree one branch higher than yesterday, impatiently waiting to grow up and finally feel whole.

Reviews

[Cody Austin]

This is breathtaking. You have such a unique view of the world and your writing hits a very esoteric note, the style is vivid and unhindered. Your voice is so powerful I hope you are doing this s**t for a living now! THANK YOU FOR THE SOLID READ MY OLD FRIEND

[Candace Cloud]

Your character could wear a t-shirt, "I am not gay, but my girlfriend is."

[Kelley Quinn]

I like that idea! I think Smurf would definitely wear a shirt like that.