Alessia said she wasn’t looking for anything serious. She said she just wanted to be friends.
How could that be? I dared to entertain the question. When I had held her in my arms only a week before. When she had curled up into my chest, as I ran my fingers along her back searchingly. When I had gone out on a whim and decided to secede myself to being the man in our relationship. When I had admitted to myself in a state of weakness, or perhaps, in a state of emboldened vulnerability that I wanted to take care of her. That I wanted to make her happy. Make her smile.
Hold her hand. I felt resentful of the universe, for some reason. Bringing something, someone, so beautiful into my life, only to have them turned away in an instant, like a swipe on a dating app, as we descended back into the distance of acquaintances. And I began to question again whether two people can ever really love each other in the same way at the same time.
The more she pulled away, the more I began to see what I was projecting onto her. Me, the analytical. The business-like. The practical. Wanting a partner, the creative. The more fun-loving, free-spirited. I have been told since I was young that I look like my dad, and that I’m practical like him too. This was finally a role I was willing to perform. Not the female, receiving. But the male, competing, asserting, prospering, creating, protecting.
The truth is, I had to overcome so much of myself just to admit that I was interested in her in the first place. I decided to act on it, to face the inner battle. And though I have lost her now, in my woundedness I have gained battle scars, and confidence. I have found new strength. Alessia may have been the first girl I have kissed in six years. But she is not the first girl I have ever been attracted to. Not even this year. Not even in this phase of life.
In fact, last week, the strangest thing happened. Alessia had invited me to a party just after we met. On my way to meet her at the party, I was doing all manner of questioning my sexuality. I knew this time I was too interested in her, I liked her too much, to let this one go. I bought a bottle of wine for her friend’s birthday. And just as I was heading down the busy, lamp-lit street, someone called my name,
“Tash?”
I squinted, confused between the hood lights of cars and the faces of a group I was passing. I focused in on the person standing in front of me. It was Shayna. Shayna Weldon. A woman I had worked with eight years ago. A creative director at a non-profit I interned at in D.C. We made small talk on the sidewalk, before we promised to get coffee that week. As I walked away, I could hardly piece together what had happened. Shayna was a hectic, zig-zagging artist. I remember she brought a couple of us to her co-op and laid out all these design books and print magazines on her floor all those years ago. And I was so in awe of her. And I was so inspired by her. And at the time, I remember, Shayna had a girlfriend. And I was 20 and had a decent amount of acne from the humidity of the D.C. summer. I remember that I had felt that pull in my body, that crush on Shayna. I was attracted to her. That was my truth.
I don’t claim to be bi-sexual. I’m considering, perhaps, that I can begin to claim that I’m queer. But then I think of my family, and how I’m the oldest of the four siblings, and all my siblings are in monogamous, heterosexual relationships and I’m just not. Of course there is some deep-seated, bellyaching, twisted shame there. My great-grandmother’s brother was gay in San Francisco in the 1940s and onwards. He taught piano at Mills College. I have a great picture of him. But he’s the last gay in our family’s village. Certainly for a couple generations. Why do I have to be the one in my family to break convention over and over? Move to Mexico to become a writer, leaving the stability of my corporate crap and the world of expectations and business school behind, now only to become a lesbian? Jesus Christ. Why do I have to be the one to go out on whim after whim? Why can’t I just go home to England, and marry a nice, rich but terribly boring banker, and butter my scones with a specific, small, silver butter knife that’s only used at tea parties?
And that’s why, holding Alessia in my arms, (for the record, she is another hectic, zig-zagging artist), it had taken a lot inside of me to get me there. I felt like I had already gone all the way with her.
I told her that I can’t be friends with her. I like her too much. She’s too cool for me to just see casually, to get hooked into the never-ending sea and landscape of heartbreak of the millennial world of dating and sex. And so, somehow the wounded yet adult-inclined part of me managed to express my need for a partner to her, for something more. And if she couldn’t give that to me, well, I figured it would be better for me to not see her at all for a while. After eight months of being with a guy that I was holding myself back from, somehow I let her in. Somehow I told myself this time, I would let myself love this person fully. Perhaps that’s what I come away with. The true, deep-seated feeling that I have it in me to give myself to another person and not hold back.
Still, I’ll always remember when I first kissed her in that mescal bar. And how sweet and good and intense it felt. And how we almost had sex right then and there, standing in the tiny, crowded space in front of all those people. And I felt like a pillar of myself. I felt like a column, a tower. A sexy temple.
