Her

She was soft and she smelled like flowers and tasted like Burt’s Bees and chocolate. And I was a self destructive tree about to crash through the garage of everything I had built.

It was a hot evening in July and she asked me to come over and make cinnamon rolls. Her apartment had a fancy glass window wall. I wore something I thought looked gay enough (how I’ve grown since). I told her I’d never even kissed a girl. We talked over the cinnamon rolls. She made cheese toasties. She had a tattoo on her thigh and hair I was jealous of. She talked like someone who knew who she was and knew what she wanted, even if she was two years younger than me.

After an hour and a half of talking and laughing, she asked if I wanted to see her room, and I said yes. We talked more, she showed me her posters. She asked if she could kiss me, said she’d be honored to be my first time with a girl.

Dear reader, I was so nervous I thought I wouldn’t remember anything else, like how I don’t remember losing my virginity with a man, and I don’t remember specific instances with him or most other men since. Like how I don’t remember anything with my first high school boyfriend, or the college guy I made out with first semester freshman year.

But I remember everything with her.

If I’m being honest, I don’t remember the proper spelling of her name. I think she wanted more, but I wasn’t honest with her. She knew it was an experiment, but she didn’t know about my partner. He knew about her. He keeps on saying, even today, “you don’t know until you know.” And I didn’t know. Until I knew.

I knew what my parents had done and do is abuse and gaslighting. I knew the belief system was flawed. I knew I had been assaulted, first by purity culture, then by men in different ways. I knew I didn’t want to be married, or I didn’t want that label on my head. I knew I didn’t know myself. My body knew that something was wrong, but I couldn’t put a finger on what that was — until her.

I didn’t know until I imagined what it could be like.

I imagined, with her. I imagined not saying yes out of uncertain want. I imagined desire and want like I never experienced (and I was inexperienced). I imagined what it must be like to be asked the first time, what you want, and to have the words and the freedom to say it. I was given that freedom before, but not in this way.

It’s easier to repeat what Glennon Doyle says in Untamed:

“I knew what it was to be wanted.

I did not know want.

I knew what it was to be desired.

I did not know desire.”

There’s another her now. She shows me freedom and light. I know what it is to want her, and I try to tell her that every day. It’s easy to love on her. It’s easy to want her.

My ex-husband and I were talking today about the narrative of marriage we were given. That says it’s hard and painful and difficult, and love dies, and that it should be that way. But really, if you love someone, it’s not hard to love them. It shouldn’t be hard to make the effort to love on someone you care about. I tried so hard to love him, and I gave everything I had. But I have so much more to give now. I wish I had been able to give that then.

My body was telling me all along, but I didn’t trust it (the heart is deceitful above all things).

Part of it is that I’ve grown. I own my wants now, I own my body now. I’m not ashamed and afraid of asserting myself. I was never given the words, never taught how to be a person. I thought that perfection, perfect love, meant sacrifice and bleeding myself dry to find what someone else needed. I didn’t realize it meant sharing the load and loving myself first. I wish I had been able to give him that back then.

If I could go back, I think it would be so much easier for me to find the words for the love I was seeking, because now I have the three words: I. love. myself. And so much of it is because of her.