Loving Both

It’s true, I’m a girl who likes girls. I don’t understand fashion or makeup, nor do I understand how to talk to girls. I want domesticity so incredibly much. I spent the first two years of college fully embracing this identity I had discovered a year before. I wore gay clothes and took gay classes. I cracked gay jokes and I wrote gay scripts. Being a lesbian was at the core of my personal identity. I accepted that some people’s sexuality was fluid, but mine sure as hell wasn’t.

Until one day, something happened. I was hanging out in the office at work between rushes, watching the surveillance cameras, distracting my manager with questions, and fiddling with his keys. He’d always been the manager I could joke around with. The one who looked like he was going to cry when I told him my two weeks date had been moved up three days. With a smile on my face, I asked him “which one is the vegas box key?” I didn’t need to know, but I was curious. He leaned over with a smile, breathing the same air as me: “It’s this one you dodo.” We laughed, a weird feeling, I had only felt once or twice before, nagging at my gut. I pushed it out of my mind. It must have been a different feeling, I must have interpreted my brain’s signals wrong. That feeling meant I had a hardcore crush, the type that doesn’t go away in a week and I was a lesbian. That fact didn’t stop my heart from racing when I walked back to the office at the end of the night and he was in a t-shirt, showing off his forearms.

When I got into the dark, silent Uber that night, I was left alone with my thoughts and a chatty Uber driver inquiring about my fatigue, work, and everything under the sun. That’s when the doubt crept into my mind and I started to spiral. Was I a stereotype? Was I projecting all those messy feelings of missing work onto my favorite manager? What if I go back home and this happens again? How am I going to explain having a boyfriend? How are my LGBT friends gonna react? Am I a traitor to the lesbian community? Was this compulsory heterosexuality? I had spiraled through all the questions of self-doubt by the time I made it home, and after the second 8+ hour day, I crashed. It didn’t matter how troubled I was by this feeling I suddenly recognized for him, I was too tired to do anything but sleep.

That night I dreamed. I dreamed of holding his hand and kissing him goodbye. I dreamed of having a life with him and raising kids with him. I dreamed all the same dreams that I had dreamed when I was crushing hard on one of my (unfortunately straight) coworkers. When I went to work that day, I found myself in an unusual cranky mood. I loved opening. I loved having the time to change things and prep things, but suddenly I was lagging, bitching and moaning about the things that I loved about opening. I crafted a way to stay until my manager arrived, then counted down the minutes until my senior manager left so we could goof off.

When the rush had subsided and my senior manager had left, I found myself back in the office, playing with his keys and watching the cameras. I grasped onto every detail. The fact that he likes cherries, is the baby of ten, and is a leftie. When he playfully called me sweetheart and that feeling in my gut returned, I realized something. My sexuality is fluid and that’s okay. It doesn’t matter what other people think or how people react. It doesn’t matter that it took me a while to get here. It just matters that I am bisexual. It just matters that when he smiles at me, I get the warm and fuzzies. Everything else is unimportant.