The Ticket to Me

There’s nothing scarier than learning something new about yourself.

She was in and out of a relationship with another girl. I thought she was kind of crazy… never showed up on time for stuff and usually smelled like alcohol. We would talk here and there, and one time we hung out for a while, and had a really long conversation about… everything… Our thing was eye contact. We just kept looking at each other for a long time until one of us looked away. It was like a little game. She told me about what it was like to come out to her parents. I told her I had never been in a relationship before. Right before we fell asleep she kissed me on the cheek, so I kissed her back.

It was so much fun and felt so easy, so much easier than any time I had spent with anyone else lately. As we kept hanging out, I couldn’t get her off of my mind, and felt distracted by how strong and dominating our friendship was in my life.

She was just someone that I thought was really cool, who became a good, and then really good friend. We found reasons to hang out together, would make excuses to watch a movie or go on a walk. My heart beat faster when I was around her, and I would sweat a little, I would wonder what she was doing or who she was talking to, and get a little bit jealous… I didn’t know what it was.

I wrote in my journal: Crush? But that felt weird. Girl crush?

One time we were palm reading in her room, and we looked at our sexuality lines. She had one that meant she liked girls, I didn’t. By palm-reading standards I was 100% straight.

Life went on and we spent time together, and time apart. I was always thinking about her and what she could be doing.

It felt like an unjustified obsession.

I tried taking up meditation.

It didn’t work.

Months went by… We got really close a few times, but I didn’t know what it meant to me, or how to recognize the feelings I had: butterflies when we held hands or spooned on her bed, the tingly energy and faint numbness that surged through me when we connected about something. They were strong feelings, but feelings that I had never felt before, and didn’t know how to label or accept.

The first time she kissed me she was really drunk. The next morning when I told her about it she said: “If only you were gay”. Huh. If only I was…

The second time she kissed me she was just a little tipsy, and came knocking on my door at 4am. I had already gone to sleep, but opened the door for some reason and then got back in bed. She came and laid down next to me, looked at me for a long time, and then slowly came towards me. We kissed once, twice, and then over and over, each one a trial, a question, an uncertainty. We kissed and talked and laid together. It happened again the next night, soberly.

Then it got hard. She was still with the other girl.

“We can’t keep doing this anymore”.

But it kept happening, and my feelings grew stronger, more certain.

And then I was in love with her. Maybe I was all along, but just didn’t know what it felt like. We said it to each other once. I felt the words coming out of my mouth but couldn’t back up the feelings because they felt so foreign to me. Even though I knew it was love, it was love with a woman.

The day she told me we really had to stop (she was really with someone else and as going to make it work), I got an urge to say what I was feeling:

“So… um, hmmm. So, I’m hesitant to say this because I just don’t know how I feel about it, but I think I only like women”.

Saying it out loud it all made sense:

I’ve always felt uncomfortable saying the word “boyfriend” like my nerves or motor skills knew it would never be a part of my life. I always just laughed along when my friends obsessed over boys and their attractiveness… I’ve always thought girls were prettier. I’ve always avoided conversations about men or intimacy because it just wasn’t a part of my life. I filled my free time really fast and was always “too busy” for anything romantic to be happening. A couple of times I made up crushes on boys I had absolutely no feelings for, just because I felt like I should.

She was for sure the best person to tell. She understood all of my feelings and uncertainty, and was practically taking the words out of my mouth.

I remember feeling so confused. “I almost don’t feel right saying it because I still feel like its not really true, or its not mine to say”.

She was right there “Yup, yup, I know. You’re like, is this really happening to me? Because you never imagined that it would”.

But mostly, she was validating:

“You’re a part of the coolest group of people ever! We’re the most accepting, the most fun, and we’re the elite… we are better than everyone else”. She had a parade for me.

And then it was real.

A few days later I skyped my best friend:

“So, I’m gay… ahhhh kfjneneiunfw. That feels weird to say.”

 She, too, said all the right things. “Girl, it doesn’t have to be anything you don’t want. It reminds me of that Eminem song: I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like”.

It feels right. I was imagining my future and my story as something that deep down I knew was never going to happen. I was trying to get to Omaha, Nebraska without a map, but I’m totally ok to go to Chicago, using my GPS… and I know I will like it there. But a little part of me feels like I should go to Omaha even though I know it’s going to feel weird and uncomfortable and hard to navigate.

And the girl? We grew distant, but my feelings for her stayed the same, so I told her again one day.

“This wasn’t just a realization for me, it was more than that! I still really care about you”.

But it became very clear to me that this huge landmark in my life was just a little detour for her. I was left feeling dumb and ashamed that my feelings were so strong and not to have them reciprocated. I wanted to crawl in a hole. But I guess that is the way that a lot of people feel at some point in their life.

Every day is a new challenge: someone new to tell, something new to think about. How am I going to have children? Sometimes I’m excited to share this new part of me, sometimes I’m scared. My cousin’s girlfriend jokes that the only way she can meet my grandparents is if she has a paper bag over her head and pretends to be a man. When my sister tried to bring her girlfriend into the house to get a drink of water after she had driven her all the way home from Boston to New Jersey, my Dad left the property. He has since been trying to convince her that her relationship is “just a phase”. My mom is so concerned about my relationship deficit that she will be relieved to know it has just been a mass of confusion.

But I‘m not confused anymore. I feel great.

Intended Publication: Modern Love

Word Count: 1307