like a girl

i could make myself like a boy if i wanted to.

do you know how hard it is to like a girl?

so easy to fall for. so difficult to keep. when i was ten there was an older girl that i spent all my time chasing. i didn’t understand it. nobody did, not even her, not really. she graduated three years before i would and made me cry. my mother comforted me through it but i saw the first stirrings of unease in her eyes, the furrow of confusion between her brows, the fleeting worry of why i cared so much at all.

when i was twelve i began to write about girls. i wrote about holding hands with a girl. i wrote it in code, like somebody might care enough to read my journal and find it all there, some shameful thought scribbled across the page before it had even fully materialized. the funniest part was, probably, that i didn’t even know why i was hiding it. to me that was friendship, the things that i wrote, the dreams i had. i didn’t differentiate. girls were girls and i could only think of them one way. to anyone else it might have been a confession.

a year later i told my friend that i liked girls just as much as i liked boys. this was an odd thing to say because i had not previously come to this conclusion, not even quietly, not even secretly. it just slipped out. but it seemed like the right thing to be -- that even if i had to want to kiss a girl, it shouldn’t change anything, because at the end of it all it wouldn’t matter what i wanted. i wanted to like boys because it was easier, never having to explain the other part of it all, when i would just find a nice boy and settle down and forget about girls. the thought of liking girls was new and scary. the thought of not liking boys was unfathomable.

i dated a girl. i kissed a girl. i loved a girl. eighth grade. ninth grade. tenth grade. i did not find a nice boy. i didn’t know how. i don’t remember when or how i realized that they would never be in the equation at all. it must not have been important. it should have bothered me but it didn’t, maybe because marriage was so far away, maybe because i sucked at commitment anyway and gender didn’t play a part in that.

my mother stopped me on the stairs and asked me if i even liked boys. the question surprised me. how could she think of me like that? i mean, it wasn’t an offensive assumption, most especially because it was true. but i was still caught off guard. she hadn’t entertained the idea even when it stared her in the face. it was odd that she would now. i said, of course i like boys. who else would i like? she might have sighed in relief. two weeks later, to drive home the lie, i pretended to have a crush on a boy that i only realized much later looked a bit like a girl.

but that was the simple part. figuring out you like girls is easier than doubting whether or not that is true at all. a man smiled at me over a video call. he was much older than me. he told me that i was very pretty. he told me lots of things. when i hung up my cheeks were red. for a terrifying moment i thought that i had suffered so long with the weight of a sin that wasn’t even mine. i thought that i had deluded myself -- that i liked boys after all -- that i could settle down and marry -- that instead of having a gay awakening i was having a straight awakening and this grown man would be the catalyst--

i texted him back and forth for two days. on the third day i grew bored. the dread eased. i did not like boys. frustration surged. i only liked being told i was pretty. i was relieved and disappointed all at once. i blocked the man. he was weird, anyway. i watched a queer girl dance, with long black hair and perfect teeth. she smiled at me. it was hard not to like her.

Author's Note

look, i can't write with proper capitalization. it bothers me.