Fleece

I'm almost 21

I think I was about 12 when I realised that I liked girls the same way I liked boys.
That the other girls didn't get crushes on girls the way I did. When I realised me and my friends didn't mean the same thing when we called girls pretty. That wanting to kiss a girl made me different.

I think I was 14 when I realised my furious determination to only look at the floor in the P.E changing rooms was more than just a shyness about bodies, and a curiosity of what theirs was like. I realised I was doing the same thing trying not to look in the windows of Victoria's Secret.

My first kiss made me wonder how different a girl's lips are.

I was 15 and in the car when I asked my Mum how she felt if I brought home a girl. My palms were sweaty.
"A friend? Of course, you can have friends." It was hard to explain that I meant romantically.
It was 2 months later when she asked over dinner if I was over that "phase". That stung. I didn't bring it up again.

I was 18 when I started going out clubbing. I was the same age when I looked at the other girls there, dressed so well, desperately wanting them to know. To see me. To be able to approach them. Washing my hands in the bathroom sink, looking at them in the mirror. Laughs like champagne flutes. Hoping, and then feeling guilty for it, that they might feel the same way as me. Eye contact set my heart on fire.

I was 19 when I tried joining the Pride society at university. I couldn't relate the same way. I'd never been discriminated against like they had.
I'm straight-passing.
I'd only ever had boyfriends.
I felt like I was faking it, doing it for attention.
I didn't struggle as they did. I could collude with the system.
I felt like an imposter.

I was 20 when I was caught looking. Drunk when she asked me if I liked women. Almost passing out when she started dancing with me, when my hands were on her waist and a different kind of drunk when I felt her warm breath on my lips, when that desperation, that yearning, that repression of a side of me was all bubbling up to the top of my lovesick brain in a country I didn't know with a girl I'd just met. She tasted of strawberry, from the Truley's. It was Halloween- she was dressed like a cow, and me, like I was dead, but I tell you I have never felt more alive. She was so soft, so warm, so different. And then she melted back into the crowd, and I never saw her again.

None of this is to say I don't like men. But when I kiss a man, that does not make me straight.

I just love women too.