Coming out ꩜ a short story, part 1/3
My beloved readers,
I’m delighted to introduce you to a short story I wrote on and off during the last two years, which was hibernating for no reason inside my computer’s writing files.
It’s about self-awareness, sexuality, connection and karmic encounters.
It’s about addiction confused as love, expectations, inner monologues.
It’s about all the pretty colours of the rainbow.
Meet Max, a 25 year-old woman, as she comes out to herself, in front of a special someone.
I hope you enjoy reading, and if it touches you in any way, please hit reply and tell me how.
P.S.: these words are better read with the following playlist inside your ears.
Thank you for being here,
꩜ Mathilde
‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘Know what?’
‘That you liked girls too.’
Max took a long sip of orange wine before answering. Every friend of hers had been asking that same question again and again since she came out to them—even the girls she dated—as if the coming out story wasn’t enough, as if every gay person on the planet would have to tell the exact moment they realised they liked people from the same gender as them, otherwise they wouldn’t be gay enough.
You cannot be gay just by being gay.
You’re gay if you give others a good gay story.
Nobody ever asked her when she realised she liked boys—that was a given—it was assumed right from the start. I mean she was a girl by birth, which meant she would fall in love with a prince, have kids and live happily ever after, so of course she liked boys. How could she not. Except she didn’t want any of this, she never wanted any of this, but it was wanted for her, wanted of her, so she started her love life with what was expected of her: falling in love with boys, then male teens, then male grown ups. And she did, not reluctantly, in fact, it just happened and she followed the wave because realising you are in love for the first time is big enough to swallow your whole attention for a while, and when you’re in love, you’re absorbed, you’re impregnated, and God knows she spent a lot of years in love, so by the time she was twenty-five she’d fell in love several times with people who happened to be male, and that was enough to put the label ‘heterosexual’ on her.
‘I can’t answer that question with one single event’, she replied, immediately pausing after that. ‘I haven’t really thought about it actually—like, the list of events that led me to know in my bones I liked girls too; that gave me enough confidence to tell people about it without feeling like a fraud for saying so, because I knew that simply saying that I liked girls too wasn’t enough—it was about convincing people and convincing myself in the process, you know? I had to sound convinced I liked girls too to come out, otherwise I would have made people think it was only a phase, and at first I thought it was, to be honest. And then I thought I only liked girls, and then I thought I liked girls and boys, and then I thought I liked neither of them. Sexuality is something, right? So defining, so important, so talked about and yet so frowned upon. It’s funny because that’s what I do all the time, searching for answers and pivots and good stories in everyone and everything and I didn’t even think of the chapters of my own sexuality.’
She paused, again, her eyes almost blank, as if she was recollecting all the memories she could behind her pupils, in the screen of her brain, just liked they did in an episode of Black Mirror. She stopped speaking for a good minute, the orange wine circling in the crystal glass she held with two fingers, leaving a greasy enveloppe on the inside with each little wave. It’s sensual, she thought to herself while coming back to the present to answer the question out loud, it’s sensual what you can do with two fingers moving gently in the right direction, at the right pace.
‘I think it was a series of little and big events, the first one I recall being at twelve, when I wrote a story on a girl at school, you know, those little essays where you had to portrait someone and use all the vocabulary you could to make the teacher like them to have a good grade—well it flowed through my hands, that essay on her, a girl I’d never seen in person but who was one of my best friend’s best friends, and I didn’t see her in person for a good ten years after that but I’d seen way enough pictures of her to portrait her well. I don’t know where the essay is today, I think I’ve lost it, or maybe my mother kept it, I don’t know, but what I do know is that I got an A+ and that my teacher must definitively have thought that I was in love with her, cause who’d picture a girl as a goddess at twelve? I remember describing her whole angelic face, her brown almond eyes, perfectly symmetrical nose, pouted lips that looked so full and so pink and so inviting, even at that young age, and the mole she had just above her upper lip, those shiny long dark curls, yeah, I remember it all. I was so impressed by her. I worshipped her—that word is more accurate. I remember sending her the essay because well, I got an A+ and I was proud but also I was craving to know what she thought of it, and I remember her blushing behind the MSN convo, not knowing what to answer, yet completely understanding what it could mean that I did choose her and not somebody else for my essay, and that I chose to describe her perfect face for at least twenty lines with a perfectly curated yet evocative vocabulary. I remember the teacher coming to me to give me my paper, saying that she liked the girl already. I made a teacher like a girl she never saw and she would never see solely by describing her face—that’s love right? Like, what else could it be?’
She stopped, sighed a little, as if she was indeed realising that she was in love with that girl now by saying it out loud to someone else.
‘I’ve never told that to anyone, you know. Not like that I mean. I’ve said to myself before that I might have been in love with her at that time, or whatever love meant at this age anyway, but I used might have and language is important. It’s not at all might have—it’s was. I was in love with a girl, and it was way before I fell for boys.’
She paused, took a breath. ‘Fuck, that’s something, because I just realised that she was the first person I wrote about, and writing proved to be the love of my life soon after. Writing things is what I do. It’s what I’m on earth for, so imagine writing about someone that young and pouring that much love into words to make someone else like her like I did.’
She stopped. ‘Do you want some more wine?’ she said, the half empty bottle already in her right hand. The woman nodded and she poured the liquor in, her hand shivering slightly, a little because of the alcohol, a lot because of the earthquake that just happened inside her.
‘Then I remember kissing a friend in school, I think I was fourteen, and I also remember kissing another girl several times in high school. It was for truth and dares every time but well, I think I enjoyed it. I did enjoy it. So soft, their lips, so gentle. And I remember the boys’ eyes looking at us, utterly aroused, almost envious. I don’t know if I did it for me or for the boys—I guess a bit of both, but a lot more for me, since it also happened when nobody else except me asked for it. At that time I remember thinking that I was bisexual, but that was a bit of a trend among the friends I had. Or maybe it was just teenage girls trying to figure out what their sexuality was. And then I dated a guy and it lasted for a while, and then another, and then another. I was full on Tumblr back then and I remember pinning pictures of women all the time, especially pictures of their bodies. I’ve always found that women were the most beautiful creatures on earth. I mean look at them. Look at us. We’re freaking gorgeous. Not because we give life, as every man on earth tells it—I don’t give a shit about giving life—I’m just saying that we’re gorgeous as we are, not because we’re meant to accomplish something, just because we are, just because we exist, just because we breathe in a living female body. And don’t get me wrong I spent years working on myself to reach that level of self love. I think I’ve reached it when I realised I was into girls too, actually. Like, if I could desire to make love to another woman, how on earth could I despise my own body?’
She paused, put her empty hand in her long dark hair and played with a lock a little.
‘Anyway that’s another story.’ She took a sip. ‘I dated a man for a while and then at some point our sexual life dried up so he suggested we could spice it up with someone else—the someone else being a woman, because another man in bed would have been too much for his ego. I was definitely down for sleeping with a woman, but not with him and a woman. It was something, too, because at that point I realised that it wasn’t him I was reluctant to share. It was her. The first woman I’d sleep with. I knew it would have happened eventually—sleeping with a woman—but I didn’t know when yet, and I definitely didn’t want to ruin the moment with someone else. I guess that’s when I found out it was time to go. So I went.’
She paused, again. ‘And then I dated other men, cause that’s what I’d known my whole life. I didn’t particularly like it, to be honest, that dating phase, but I didn’t want to go back to a closed relationship so I went on with it. One day I opened Tinder and switched from ‘only men’ to ‘men and women’. The app showed me way more men than women and I found myself disappointed so I switched it to ‘only women’ for a while, yet it still showed me men. Funny how they still think that we’re unsure of what we really want, which is not them. I didn’t do anything though. Didn’t text, didn’t date, didn’t do anything. I was too afraid. But I kept swiping, until I switched it to ‘men and women’ again and closed it for months.’
She stopped and stared at the woman with a smirk.
‘That’s when you appear in the story.’
If you felt something, hit reply and tell me. That’s why writers do what they do.
& if you liked part one, send it to a friend who might like it too.
See you in a few days for part two. Love you lots :)
That's a great one, Mathilde! Can wait for the two next part of this little story.