The first time I had sex with a girl, we did it in a closet. No, seriously. She had a huge walk-in closet with a small twin-size daybed in it. She would sit on that bed, light candles - her parents didn't know she did that - draw and write on the walls. It was like being inside her soul. She painted and drew and put things on those walls that were beautiful, honest, and every reason I loved her so dearly. 

I was “straight,” by the way. I have always thought that I was "straight". The alternative wasn’t feasible. Fooling around, that's all we were doing. I was just a young, wild girl, fooling around, and it wasn’t serious. But it really was. Why? because I loved her and I knew that… I loved her. 

At 6 AM after I had the most sexually-induced, emotionally enlightening, experience of my life, I fell asleep next to her, panic-stricken, doing the exact thing that has not ceased, even to this day, asking myself, "Am I a lesbian?"

So that night, under the guise that we were just senior high school friends, we went up to her room, shut and locked the door. She lit a few candles, started a playlist - "I Kissed a Girl", "1950", Sofia", "I Touch Myself", "Betty", "Dance Like Nobody's Watching" and a bunch more. Some songs made me feel like I either wanted to cry, to touch myself, or never listen to them again. They all touched me. But I digress. 

We sat next to each other and giggled.

“Are we really going to do this?” I laughed. She laughed, too.

I told her I had never done this before. Half of me was calmed by the fact that I had some inkling of how to touch her, because it was how I’d want to be touched. But it was more foreign to me than a boy’s body. More foreign to me even though I’d had her same physiology all my life. Because none of that matters when you want to love someone for more than just their body. 

So, we listed how we were going to do this. We would kiss first, and then we outlined the next steps and how we would do them one at a time and then we would stop and talk about it and make sure we still wanted to do it or go to the next step and if at any point one of us wanted to stop, that was it, we would stop, but we didn’t stop. 

I had “boyfriends” before, adolescent men that I could seduce into loving me with my feminine looks and overtly sexual nature. Boys were easy. Girls weren’t.  

Girls were what I really wanted. When something ever matters to me, I am usually perplexed and terrified and cowardly and confused. These boys never made me orgasm, I made myself orgasm, they just happened to be there while it happened. They never made me cry for any other reason than that I felt unwanted. They touched me to warm me up to touch them, not because they wanted me to be that completely vulnerable and literally and metaphorically naked in front of them. Please note: this is not to say that all men are like this, of course, that was just my experience at the time. 

So roughly four hours into the first night of the long-awaited physical enactment of our already raging love affair, she was between me and I didn’t have any clothes on and I knew what was about to happen because we had talked about this and I can’t even phrase it into words how badly I wanted it, but I’ll tell you that it was just about as much as I wanted to run away screaming because… “I was not gay.”  

She could sense that. She asked me what was wrong. I told her the truth. She smiled. I don’t remember what she said exactly, but it calmed me, and we could go slowly and that I just had to lay back and close my eyes and not think about anything but how it felt. 

The most poignant memory I have from that night was looking down at her, and feeling like I wasn’t worthy of such a perfect person loving me like this, and even though I kept on with my nonsensical thoughts, she made me come in that back-arching, oh-my-god-please-don’t-stop, repeated exhales and sighs, waves of that familiar high that kept crashing through your body and afterwards you don’t think, that was great, you think in a, I love her kind of way. That kind of orgasm. And I thought that was as good as it got until I made her feel the same thing, and that was even better. 

We lay next to each other for a while after that, limbs intertwined, the playlist still on repeat, the candles burning low. The sun was rising. My real life was dawning again. She was falling asleep, but my eyes were peeled open, and staring at the ceiling. 

I haven’t grown out of that yet. But I’m not entirely unhappy that it happens. It tells me it means something. It shows me what matters. It scares the motherfucking shit out of me, but it’s never there while I’m staring into some woman’s eyes like she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And so, I know, it’s not what I’m doing that’s wrong, it’s what the world would say about it that is. I’m never afraid of it until I realize it’s another notch in the “reasons the world will exile me”-belt.

And so, I think to myself, it will be okay because eventually there will be a woman that I will wake up next to who doesn’t make me feel that way because I know she’ll be there after breakfast, and that even if everyone else looks with disdain, she won’t. She’ll be there if other people walk out. 

But the truth is, the only people who walked away were those women themselves.