To the ones I’ve loved before (P.3)

“You want to share this with me?” I was staring way deep into the bonfire, my brain hazy when his voice pulled me from my head. I turned my head slightly to the left where his hand held half a chocolate bar out to me. I smirked. Oh this boy knew how to charm a girl. I didn’t love s’mores, but I sure loved chocolate.

We met in May 2013, at a summer bonfire through mutual friends on my first day back from my school in New York. My best friend was close with his best friend at the time and I have a sneaking suspicion he was brought there to meet me. I was 19 about to turn 20 and he was a year older. I had just finished a diatribe against traditional relationships for a small audience of my high school friends and meant every word of it. I wanted a handsome human (gender irrelevant to me) to take care of all my needs (amirite ladies), and teach me some lessons (I was dipping my toes into what would end up being my kink identities), with none of the silly entanglements involved. It was a good party. There were strong drinks and fun people, including him. He was charming and funny and, presumably as he went to an Ivy League School, very smart. We fed off each other and bantered and talked about school and abyss of the “after-school” time. We were propelled forward by jello shots and keg beer and at the end of the night he asked me for my number. I was playing designated driver to my close friend and plus one who was truly and properly hammered, slurring and stumbling and trying desperately to go home with a boy I went to high school with. While we were all saying goodbye to the hosts I stood in front of the boy I hardly knew and leaned backwards, tilting my head against his chest. He was warm and comfortable and clearly as into me as I was trying to be into him. His hand found the exposed skin of my waist and ran his thumb over it slowly, it was foreplay and we both knew it.

We wouldn’t actually have sex until much later, when we were officially an ~item~. I would stall the process as long as I could because, ha, I had unresolved traumas and also I wasn’t really into men anyways.   He was exactly everything everybody thought I would be with. He was a boy first and most importantly of all. He had goals and he had ambitions and he had a plan to achieve them. He went to a good school, he was polite, he loved my family and they loved him. I started to love him because I was supposed to.

But he was also manipulative, and controlling, and invalidated my sexuality and identity at every turn. He would get angry and attempt to forbid me to spend time with one of my best friends, with whom I just happened to have a romantic and sexual history. He didn’t understand or try to understand when I came out to him about my sexuality and also my various kink identities. He tried to understand how to handle me and my submissiveness.  He tried to listen when I spoke about my eating problems and my relationship with my dad. But he only listened to respond. He only listened because he thought he would have something constructive to say when in reality he liked to hear himself talk.

I didn’t respect that relationship at all. We had only been together for three months when I slept with someone else for the first time, and that continued for nearly a year. The day before I finally ended it I slept with two people. At the same time (post about them to come).

I like to think this series is a nice way for me to decompress from past relationships. I think though for particular person it’s helping me identify all the ways I did things wrong. It would have been so much easier and less hurtful for all involved. I knew when we got together I didn’t actually want a relationship. I knew that going back to school in the fall would be much more satisfying and fun if I were single. But he was exactly who I was expected to be with, I had to give it a chance. He was my last ditch attempt at being straight, and people what my family wanted.

I shouldn’t have used him in this way, especially since the end of this relationship hit him so hard for a while. I learned some lessons and we all moved on. Time will only tell I guess if I learned well enough.

On Achieving Queer

Definitely Straight™

“You know how I know I’m definitely straight?”

“Hm?” I said, my voice muffled against the duvet of Anna’s* bed.

“All I can think about is how badly I want James’* dick right now.”

I chuckled, not at all sharing in the sentiment. We were 16, James was her boyfriend. I also had a boyfriend: I did not want his dick right now. What I did want was to go back to doing what we had just been doing for the last 3 hours.

I closed my eyes, turned my face back into the duvet and went back to replaying the whole night in my mind.

I wish I remembered how it started. I remember mundane things like the date (May 2^nd, at least that’s what Facebook says, it was probably actually the end of April sometime), what I was wearing (blue tank top stacked with a white tank top on me pink plaid tank top on her). I remember, strangely, that that morning I had been thinking about kissing girls and how badly I wanted to, quickly forcing those thoughts of my head.

I remember the moment right before the first kiss. I remember the moment thinking her breath was cool and smelled like chemically flavored sugar from the dozen or so pixie stix we had knocked back over the course of the night. I remember the skin of her waist was so soft, the softest thing I had ever felt. Her lips were thin and smooth and gentle against mine, instead of insistent and forceful as were the lips I had experienced until this point.

It was like my whole body finally exhaled when our lips met, it was like I was experiencing a kiss for the very first time instead of the thousandth, approximately. I remember it was over far too quickly and Anna was flipping a switch, harsh light chasing away everything we had just done.

Oh no. I thought suddenly.

“Yeah, same. Definitely straight.” I mumbled instead of saying any of this. Anna* smiled and flicked off the light again.

She knocked out almost immediately and I stayed awake, acutely aware of my body’s response to her and unable to sleep.

            Definitely straight. I thought over and over again, holding the cross I always wore, until I fell asleep.

Bisexual

“So the thing is, Anna and I used to hook up and also I think I’m bi?” I spat out all in one breath before Lauren* could react.  We were sitting in my car in the deserted parking lot of a strip mall we frequented.  Lauren quickly looked to the side and then back at me.

“Oh, is that all? Wait you and Anna are hooking up? What? Doesn’t she have a boyfriend?” I dropped my head into my hands and nodded.

“Used to! Used to!” I repeated even though that was technically a lie. I was 17 now, a full year after that first, and definitely not last, night with Anna. The last time we had hooked up had been the oh-so-cliché prom night about a month earlier, with Lauren sleeping about five feet away from us after a long night of screaming at my now ex and dancing. I shut my eyes tight against the memory of the breathless, silent kisses and still forbidden touches. It had been the first time her hands had slid under my shirt and between my legs and I was still reeling from the utter rightness of the night, and how much I couldn’t wait for the next one.

“I mean. I figured that’s what you wanted to tell me, it’s all good. Why are you so freaked out?” Lauren said confused. I was visibly shaking. I didn’t know why I was so freaked out. It didn’t sound right, it sounded so strange coming from my mouth.

“I’m bi.”

“I think I’m bisexual.”

It really wasn’t right. But what else could I be?

Pansexual ~I don’t see gender~

“I just like don’t identify as anything I don’t know.” This would be so much easier if I wasn’t so drunk and so very scared. I had never been asked this I did not have a ready response.

“But like if you had to identify…how would you?” He said, insistent on an answer from me. I was 20 now. I had been going with pansexual for about a year now and it was…fine. It was fine. It worked.  It still wasn’t something I widely broadcasted. It helped me explain my relationships with men and my “only physical” attraction to women and also my short-lived online flirtations with those who lived as non-binary or on the trans spectrum. I hated the identification process so much. I hated wrestling with my extended family’s religious views, I hated the fact that I had a boyfriend I loved but for some reason couldn’t shake the attraction to my suite mate. The attraction I acted on more than once. I fashioned myself someone who just didn’t see gender, or take it into consideration when feeling attraction. This wasn’t true of course. Gender is very important to how many people identify and it’s equally important to be sensitive to people’s appropriate pronouns and descriptive language.

“Well you’re obviously the gayest one in the room.” He shot back after I didn’t answer.   For some reason tears filled my eyes and I had to leave, the alcohol slowing me. I said goodnight to everybody and went back to my dorm where I would cry until several pairs of arms found me and I felt safe with myself again.

Achieving Queer

At this moment as I type this I’m in my bed, a black cat curled up next to me, and my girlfriend curled up and sleeping as well, 200 miles away from me. I’m so comfortable in my bed but hers is so much more welcoming. I’ll be back with her soon. I’m 23 and actually so comfortable with so many parts of myself, even though my depression will convince me otherwise. I remember the moment I claimed queer as my own. I was at my city’s Pride festival last summer and walked up to a booth selling adorable merchandise with rainbows and glitter galore. They had displayed a particularly flashy tote bag that said, appropriately “Totes Queer”.  I chuckled, I love puns.  I had been dating my girlfriend for about seven months at this point and still hadn’t really “come out” to my extended family.

In a moment of recklessness I asked the man working the booth for one of those bags, which I used for the rest of the day to hold all my complimentary condoms and (terrible) sex toys and lesbian erotica I had bought after being charmed by the author.  I posted a picture on Instagram and Facebook along with the “=” tee shirt I had bought to commemorate the day.  There still haven’t been any responses from them to that picture, nearly a year later.

Everything has finally brought me here. Everything has brought me to living so loudly and loving my person so fiercely I can hardly bring myself to remember how scared I used to be, it’s embarrassing. I’ve found that accepting sexuality as a journey has been the thing that made it all the easier. That made it just as easy to accept myself as fat or to accept myself as mentally ill. Queer encompasses everything I was too afraid to say all throughout my teen years. I could be anything; I could be something different every day. I’m finally proud, I’m finally loved by exactly the person I’ve always wanted and needed but never allowed myself to have. This person is kind and generous and understanding and so lovely in every sense. This person is exactly who I hoped I would find, and I’m so lucky they’ve appeared in my life just in time to see, who I believe, will be the best version of myself. I am now the person unafraid to label and claim identifies as my own and also unafraid to change. And we have so long still to go.

~Katie ❤

*All names have been changed*