I remember having a best friend, back in kindergarten. I don’t remember much, only her name, and that her hair was the same colour as mine but longer, and that we used to spend all our time together.
I remember, with the same clarity of long gone dreams, the day it happened. We were both about to leave school for the day, and we were sent to grab our coats and bags, and we happened to kiss goodbye in front of the open door of our classroom. A kiss on the lips, like our parents, like our relatives.
There was somebody shouting, probably our teacher, and I remember a fanfare, someone telling us we shouldn’t kiss like that, that we were never to do it again. I remember asking why, since it was the way I was taught people that love each other would greet and say goodbye, and we did love each other ever so much. Once more we were told never to do it again, that we were only allowed to kiss our parents and siblings like that, and that maybe we should spend time with other kids too.
I remember changing school the following year, and I got a “boyfriend”. I was five and he was six, and I don’t remember any teacher ever telling us off for holding hands during recess, or for sneaking out during parent-teacher meetings to exchange ‘grown up’ kisses by the back entrance. I don’t even remember his name, but he would bring me sweets and make me promises of being together forever.
I remember my best friend, the person I still love the most, asking me if I would like to try kissing. It was me, her, and another girl, and we had too much popcorn and soft drinks and watched a bad horror movie, and we still had our too tight jeans on even if we were sitting cross legged on the bed, and I refused to go first. I was terrified that it would mean something besides being fourteen, of bringing to the surface something I was not ready to face. But we kissed, just a quick peck, and for a while it became as natural as holding hands. She still claims I have the softest lips she’s ever kissed.
I remember being seventeen, or maybe eighteen, or maybe twenty, and seeing a fire breathing show. She had red hair, like I so desperately wanted to have, and she was athletic, like I so desperately wanted to be, and I decided she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was breathing fire to the rhythm of the drums, and I told myself that if I ever were to have one exception in my barely existent love life, she would have to be the one.
I remember being twenty-one, and sixteen hundred miles from everything I had ever known, and coming to a resolution. I had to stop lying to myself.
I was drunk the first time I had another girl’s tongue in my mouth, and to my wonder and disappointment it was just a tongue. Slick and everywhere and did I really deny myself for so long for this?
We almost fell off the stairs, and we still laugh about it.
I remember being twenty-three, and that friend whom I spent most of my teenage years with, whose invitation at her wedding when we were just nineteen and some older guy had promised her the world, I had thrown out and spent days crying over, was never just a friend.
She was my first love.
I hope she’s having the most wonderful life, and I know she still has the same infinite fondness for me as I do for her. There’s never been another I’ve known so well in my life.
I text my friends, and I tell them I have no idea how I could ever think I was straight. But I do. I had to be, because the alternative was too scary to consider. And now it’s not.
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