dispatches from crazyville

One night in the fall of my second year of college, I was lying in bed half-naked with J listening to Tracy Chapman. The only light was a desk lamp so dim it blurred the edges of reality enough that I could pretend I hadn’t just had sex with a woman. I still wasn’t out as a lesbian, even to myself. I thought I was just attracted to this one woman. It wasn’t like I was in love with her.

We’d met in the break room at Kroger. She worked in the deli and I was a courtesy clerk. She said, “You look tired.”

“I just moved. I am tired.”

That was it.

A few days later she asked if I wanted to come to dinner. She was cooking Thai food with friends. That she was hitting on me did not even cross my mind. “Yeah!” I said. “I love dinner.”

I invited her to dinner a few days later to return the hospitality. She showed up with flowers.

OH. I thought. SHIT.

I commenced to drinking an entire bottle of wine very quickly. We sat in the dark after dinner and she caressed my cheek. It felt good. I hated it. It was all I could do not to scream. I stayed very very still. The next day I told her I wasn’t gay.

The longer we were friends, the more I was attracted to her. Then one night, I got bold and pushed my lips onto hers. I was making out with a girl. And I liked it. I wanted her. My skin wanted her skin. It wasn’t gross or uncomfortable at all, nor did it feel like I was compensating her for being nice to me.

There we were. We could hear her roommates guessing the questions to Jeopardy answers through the wall behind us. I decided to join in. “Why do you live with a married couple?” I asked her.

The story revolved around her roommate A from freshman year. They were best friends and had all these freshman misadventures together. She didn’t use romantic terms to describe it, but it sounded like A flirted with J, then got married to some man, making J jealous. J construed it as anger that A had married a man who was controlling. She hadn’t seen A in over a year.

Neither of us talked for awhile. Then I asked, “Were you in love with her?”

“Why?”

“Well, because, I don’t know. The way you described your friendship, it was intense, like you were in love with her. And maybe it was reciprocal, but she was so frightened of that, she married this man. And you were jealous.” She didn’t respond. “It sounds just like my friendship with N.”

“Are you in love with N?”

“I never thought of it until just now while you were talking about A. It sounded so familiar. I guess I am. I’m in love with N.”

More silence. I guess that’s not the thing to say when you’re lying in bed with a woman who’s not N.

“But she’s straight,” I said. “So it doesn’t matter.”

Except I couldn’t let it go. It mattered more than anything. I was consumed by this realization.

I biked home. We dated sporadically for a year, and I never did spend an entire night with her. Subconsciously, I think I believed that if I spent the night, there was no going back. I was holding on to the hope that I wasn’t gay, I just liked this one girl. Now, I knew I was in love with N. That’s two girls, so I must really be gay. How could I be gay? How could I live with myself for 19 years, being gay, and not know it? That’s a huge thing to not know about myself. It didn’t seem possible. I dated guys. One, in high school, for a whole year. Three in college so far. I wasn’t in love with them either, nor, I realized had I been attracted to them. I’d dreaded the ends of dates when there was the potential for physical intimacy. I hated the way they smelled, and their hair, and the weight of them. Those hideous genitals. I managed to avoid having actual intercourse with any of them. But, they were nice. I figured sexual contact was like a payment to them for being nice to me. I believed that all women must feel that way about sex with men. Even then, didn’t occur to me. . . hello. . .

Regardless, here I was, gay. I wanted to have sex with J. She was soft and gentle and smelled good. She was in love with me, and for the first time in a romantic relationship, I felt like she was in love with me, not just desirous of my body. But I was not in love with her. I desired her body. I hated myself for wanting her. I hated that no matter how far I ran, I could never get away from myselfishself.

I would sit on the hood of my car and stare at the moon. The moon kept coming back. The moon didn’t care who was gay or dead or dreaming of standing on it. Ever. People all over could see the same moon. And the moon had been there long before me and would continue to be there whether I was or wasn’t.

I would drive to the grocery store at three or four in the morning and walk around for an hour filling grocery carts with themed items (say, things that started with p: pineapple, pancake mix, pantyhose, party favors, pork n beans, pretzels, prophylactics) and leaving them around the store. But ultimately, I had to go back home. And ultimately, there I was.

When I couldn’t sit any longer with the discomfort of being unable to escape my body, I prowled the kitchen for sharp things. I cut my hands and my face. I was afraid to sleep, afraid I would wake up and discover some new huge disturbing thing about myself, like maybe I was also a Fundamentalist Christian or a Nazi or something, and I didn’t think I could handle any more surprises.

I distrusted everything about myself now. Everything except that I was in love with a straight girl who’d been dating the same guy off and on since sophomore year of high school.