My body knows before I do.
It gives itself away in unexpected moments: it’s in the nervous laugh that escapes when I talk to the beautiful bookstore owner who sets aside new titles she thinks I’ll like and waves at me each time we pass each other running down 18th Street. It’s in the idea that won’t go away as I splay across some rocks by the lake with a woman who turns my cheeks crimson. I could do this with you always, I think as we read our books, glancing back at each other every few minutes.
Our first date is at a chicken and fish joint down the street from my apartment. It’s the kind of place made for hot summer days—the patio is four times as big as the tiny interior, lined with ping-pong tables and red-striped umbrellas that are currently dragging under the weight of a foot of snow. There’s something almost rebellious about occupying this space in the dead of winter. It’s one of the things I love most about this season; the way meeting the brutality of it head-on feels like a victory.
We hunch over the long wooden table, leaning in close so we can hear each other over the thrum of fifty other diners packed into this tiny room. Our coats and hats and scarves are tucked tightly under us, and inevitably a glove slips under the table and needs to be retrieved before the end of the night. The window next to us fogs up as we talk, and slowly the lights outside dissolve into a soft-focus blur. We order Negroni slushies and when they come out they’re the same shade of red as our noses, which are still raw from the walk here.
Ines is mostly quiet and I can’t seem to shut up. My heart races right out of my chest.
I hear myself caveating I’m not sure how bi I am really, I’m just trying this out, and I want to be honest with you, I’ve never done this before—which is absurd because I’m 24 and not yet legally divorced from the one person I’ve been with. I’ve never really dated women but I’ve never really dated men, either.
Ines’s hair is long and dark as black coffee (hair that color makes me weak in the knees even now), but I barely remember anything else about her. I think she worked with kids—as a nanny?—and now that I stop to consider it, maybe she wasn’t quiet at all. Maybe the buzzing in my head was just loud enough that I wasn’t at that table with her.
I’ve tried not to write this a hundred times, have wondered why I need to.
I came out 11 years ago or two years ago, depending on who you ask. But in reality, coming out is something you have to do again and again. For nine of those years, I never hid my sexuality but I didn’t claim it, either.
And then one night, a coworker I was friendly with—someone whose apartment I’d been to for birthday parties and wine nights—had too many cheap beers and made the kind of comment that’s only uttered under the assumption that its subject isn’t in the room. They can love whoever they want, but do they have to be so LOUD about it?
I’m sick of strife as the only queer story that gets told, so why am I telling you this?
So many people have to fight hard to come out. I didn’t. Even though homophobia was rampant in the very midwestern, very Lutheran places I was raised in, it always bounced off me easily. Maybe because I didn’t realize I was gay at the time, I had no problem seeing through their contemptuous and coded love the sinner, hate the sin talk. To them, queerness would always be something to forgive, to excuse, to look away from.
How could loving another consenting adult be wrong? I never believed in God, but I did believe in this. I think I’m bi, I told my almost-husband casually one day, but like, probably only a two on the Kinsey scale.
My co-worker’s words sat uncomfortably in my mind for weeks.
I thought about them at lunches and happy hours, where there were usually at least two other queer people at the table but the conversations remained Very Straight.
I thought about them as I considered the number of intense are-we-dating-or-are-we-friends relationships I’d had with gay women even after coming out.
I thought about them every time I clocked my growing unease in primarily straight spaces, the way I’d run my hands over my wrists, my knees, my thighs because I had the uncanny feeling I just wasn’t there the way everyone else was.
My worst fear was never that I’d like being with a woman. It was that I’d somehow stumble into a relationship only to realize I was using her all along. Using her to—what? To experiment? To be more interesting? To feel something?
We’re taught not to trust our own bodies.
If I’d listened to mine, I would have noticed this: the magnetic hook in my belly that pulled me across rooms, that made my heart beat fast and my palms wet. The animal need that rose up inside me around certain women, the overwhelming desire to pursue them. (Is this why men look at us with such hungry eyes?)
I didn’t need homophobia to complicate coming out; learning that my body needed taming did that just fine.
Like so many girls, I was introduced to good food and bad food by the time I was seven. The goal was to be thin—thin was pretty, was confident, was loved. Every meal, every snack was a test: would I be strong and good? Or would I resign myself to a life of being unwanted? I ate too little and took pride in the ache in my gut and the black spots in my vision, and then a week later I ate past the point of fullness until I couldn’t feel my body at all. Either way, my hunger was not to be trusted.
So when men kissed me at bars and in the back of cabs and my whole body said no, I didn’t understand. I assumed I was broken.
(For a time, it was hard to tease out my body’s very real response to being sexually assaulted from the part of me that just wasn’t attracted to so many men. The fucked-upedness of that is a whole other essay.)
My worst fear was leading a woman on, going through the motions only to realize I couldn’t love her as she wanted. But the whole time I’d been doing that very thing to men.
And I missed out on truly seeing any of them.
It’s hard to be curious about someone else when you’re doing everything possible not to look at yourself.
It’s hard not to feel ashamed some days, knowing how many people I sat across from and didn’t listen to.
But maybe this is the lifelong work. The learning to look outside ourselves and the learning to look right at ourselves. Since coming out—really, truly, fully—I’ve fallen for women and I’ve fallen for men. I’m not a two on the Kinsey scale, I’m more like a four. It matters less now who’s sitting across the table from me. I feel every inch of my body. I hear them, and I hear myself.
How to Put Yourself Together
Love this.
This is great.