DESIRE

Your first kiss is with a girl, and your second one too. But when people ask you about your first kiss, you tell them of that time you wait for your friends inside the bowling alley to come out, and he pulls you into the darkness of a nearby alleyway. You describe how he lifts your chin and how, as he bends down to kiss you, all you can think to say is “I don’t know how this is supposed to work.” It’s not your first kiss, but it’s the first one that counts.

Your bedroom wall is covered in magazine cut-out collages of women, but it’s not the reason your grandparents are worried. They sit your Mom down in the garden for an emergency cup of tea, because you had a girlfriend sleep over in your bed. It’s like that time they’re worried about what it means when you spill red nail varnish on yourself after watching an entire season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When she tells you about their concern, you don’t understand. At the time, it’s more likely that you considered sucking the blood out of someone else than realise that you could desire a woman. Even though the breasts, legs, hips, and lips of women are taped all over your room and painted into your art, that night you’re simply too lazy to pull out the guest mattress.

They say that men want to be with the women in magazines and that women want to be like them. As you surround yourself with their pictures, you sometimes forget that you’re supposed to be like them and wonder about being with them instead. When you first desire a woman, you become aware of yourself as someone who could choose and not just wait to be chosen. I know you’re not quite sure what is clicking into place, but you become keenly aware of the part of you that can imagine more for yourself than wanting to be wanted by men.

Listen to that part.

It knows that something got lost as you grew out of your childhood and into mandatory straightness: your desires.

When you were born into this world, they declared you’d be a woman and with that proclamation you were served a narrow selection of acceptable desires:

To want to be like them, not with them.

To take what you’re given and to make yourself like it.

To be chosen, not the one choosing.

I want you to know that you owe that label nothing.