Her first crush was on a boy in her class in second grade.
He made a lot of jokes until the teacher sent him to stand out in the hallway.
She liked his carefree attitude.
And no matter how old she got, she would never stop finding herself attracted to free spirits.
She didn’t really know what it was.
She knew that she thought about him a lot.
More often than she thought about her other friends.
Like he lived in her mind.
She knew that she was elated the day that he drew a picture of a flower just for her.
But then he moved away and she didn’t feel that way again for a while.
Until summer camp.
Breakfast on the first day.
Catching sight of an athletic-looking boy across the room.
Daydreaming about his soft hair, his gentle eyes.
And the next day, out the by the lake.
If she introduced herself then maybe he would share a kayak with her.
So she introduced herself.
And her crush answered.
And her crush had a girlish voice.
And her crush had the name of a girl.
And she quickly realized that her crush had been a tomboyish girl this whole time.
So she decided that the crush was now negated because she liked boys.
But she still got butterflies around this person.
Even if this person was a girl.
But when summer camp ended she went back to school.
And to crushing on boys.
She liked boys a lot.
She didn’t often like girls.
Only once, really.
And her summer crush had been so androgynous.
She supposed it was just an exception.
One girl on her list of boys.
Until her middle school best friend.
She didn’t know that she had a crush on her middle school best friend.
She didn’t consider it.
She just knew that she constantly craved the feeling she got when she was alone with her.
She wanted her undivided attention, and to pour all her secrets into her best friend.
They were inseparable.
And when she had the flu and she was absent from school, her best friend wrote her a letter and put it in her desk.
She returned and read the letter.
It welcomed her back and told her she had been missed.
There was a heart at the bottom of the page.
A piece of notebook paper, the ragged edges still there.
She thanked her best friend and hugged her and it felt like home.
But a year later they were at different schools.
Her friend was at a new school with new friends and she was jealous.
She only saw her once a month and she felt rejected.
Tossed aside.
Brokenhearted.
But it still hadn’t crossed her mind that perhaps her feelings were romantic.
It wasn’t on the table.
After all, she liked boys.
She didn’t understand where the intensity of her feelings were coming from.
And she wouldn’t understand it for a long time.
Because in high school there was a football player who diverted her attention.
She watched him shooting hoops in the gym while she worked up the courage to approach him.
When the weather was pretty it reminded her of him.
She wanted to sit beneath a shady tree with him and talk about everything.
Like she used to do with her friend in middle school.
So she passed him a note in math class.
This led to a week of in-class notebook-paper chatting.
Pieces of notebook paper with jagged edges unremoved.
Just like middle school.
And then he asked her to prom.
And she was ecstatic but tried her best to play it cool.
She wore a purple dress with subtle pink lace and dedicated a song to him.
They danced together and it became their song.
And their respective life paths eventually led them down separate roads.
But that moment with him would always remain a monumental memory.
Even if there was a curly-haired girl with a yellow dress by the DJ booth that night whose graceful beauty took her breath away.
A few months later in college an upperclassman took her under her wing.
A friendly girl who wore pink lipstick and springtime skirts in the fall and who happened to have a girlfriend.
The two friends bonded over indie rom-coms and Disney princesses and a general love of things that were girly in the most cliche of ways.
One night they were lying on the couch watching a movie and a thought floated into the the mind of the freshman.
Involuntarily, but clear as day.
She thought that in another world in which her friend did not already have a girlfriend, perhaps they would make a good couple.
She thought about how easy it would be to fall in love with a woman, considering she was a woman herself.
She thought about how strange it had felt at times, not to share a gender in common with her ex-boyfriend.
She liked the idea of understanding, firsthand, the gender of her partner.
Hypothetically.
Of course.
The next day she asked her friend when she knew she was a lesbian.
Just out of curiosity.
Her friend said that there was no defining moment.
And that people are just people.
And that she liked the word queer because it’s less restrictive.
She said that she’s always been open to dating men, but that she just hasn’t been attracted to any in that way.
But she said that she’s been attracted to genderqueer people before.
But that the word lesbian is close enough, because words are nothing more than approximations anyway.
The freshman tried to follow, but she didn’t really know what genderqueer meant.
Then her friend went on to say that society tricks people into thinking they’re straight by not giving them any other options.
But then she continued to say that her parents were liberal enough to explain to her the spectrum of sexuality when she was young.
So she always kind of knew, because if she closed her eyes and pictured her future, she usually saw it with a woman.
The freshman answered.
She said that she agreed about society.
And that she didn’t think that her parents would accept her if she came out to them.
This was only hypothetical.
Of course.
But her friend didn’t realize that.
And her friend invited her to the campus LGBT alliance meeting.
And the freshman wanted to answer that she was only being hypothetical.
She had nothing to come out about.
She pictured her future with a man.
She was straight.
With the exception of the girl at summer camp.
And at prom.
And middle school.
And the thought she entertained the night before about dating a woman.
These were a lot of exceptions.
But if she were bisexual she wouldn’t be a 50/50 bisexual.
So it didn’t count.
Right?
But then what if she wanted to be with a girl?
Hypothetically.
She didn’t want to limit her capacity for love.
Theoretically.
So she went.
Her friend introduced her to a person with red lips and facial stubble.
Skinny jeans and a purple blouse with purple Vans.
The freshman assumed the person to be a man because of the facial stubble.
She assumed the person to be gay as well.
And then she found herself a bit disappointed, unexpectedly, at the thought of this person being uninterested in women.
But she was wrong anyway.
On both counts.
The person gave her a perfect handshake.
Firm yet welcoming.
Then they gave their name and pronouns.
Their pronouns were they/them.
The freshman was confused.
But the person was good-natured and laughed about her confusion.
They explained that they were genderqueer.
They said that they did not feel like a man, but they did not feel like a woman either.
They were probably more to the feminine side of the gender spectrum, they said.
But not quite close enough to be a woman.
So they were in the middle.
Genderqueer.
And now everything that the freshman thought that she knew about gender and how to categorize her own attractions was meaningless.
The freshman asked the person’s sexual orientation.
She was genuinely curious.
But then she realized how rude it sounded.
But the person just laughed again and said they didn’t have one.
They explained that physical sex is on a spectrum, just like gender.
And you can’t know someone’s gender identity just by looking at them anyway.
Or where they fall on the spectrum of physical sex.
And wasn’t romance so much more important than sexuality anyway?
So what did it matter?
The freshman wasn’t used to these enlightened concepts and perspectives.
She was from a small town where everything was taken at face value.
She was the ex-girlfriend of a football player.
So when she answered she was surprised by her own words.
She said that she felt similarly.
That her sexuality could not be neatly defined.
She had never said this out loud before.
But now it had been stated.
She said this to a genderless individual whose androgynous brand of femininity she was finding herself increasingly attracted to by the moment.
If she was being honest, she was finding this person to be another “exception.”
Because to not suppress her feelings would be to admit that the eye contact, the exchanging of words, the close proximity, it all felt like one romantic explosion of fireworks.
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