“I get the feeling that something is up with you,” Eric says over the phone with an undeniable tinge of concern in his voice, like he’s bracing for something we both know but are afraid to confront.
I breathe in heavily, gathering every last bit of my courage. So this is it. This is the moment that changes everything, I think to myself before opening my mouth to say, “There’s something that’s been weighing heavily on me, for a very long time, longer than I can even remember.” Choose your words carefully, Libbie. Be delicate with his heart, I remind myself. “I know saying this will affect the both of us in a way that is irreversible, which is why I’ve been hesitant to even think it, let alone say it,” I say, buying time with awkward utterances as my voice quivers. I feel myself teetering over the edge of a cliff. My subconscious is screaming at me to just say it already, woman! as my conscious mind begins to pace around the sharp edges of the steep drop.
Silence ensues until he chimes in, “Are you there?” I run to the edge and take my leap of faith that’s been patiently waiting in the wings for as long as I can remember.
“I . . . I think I’m attracted to women,” I whisper. “I think I’m gay, Eric. Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.” I feel my face grow hot instantly as tears begin to well up in the corners of my eyes. Silence. “Are you there?” I ask desperately. “Eric?”
“I’m here,” he says. “There’s no reason to be sorry,” he says, choosing his next words with meticulous sensitivity. I sit down on the couch to steady my shaky legs. “Here’s the deal . . . I just want you to be happy. Life is way too short to not live truthfully,” he says.
His immediate acceptance is shocking.
“Are you surprised? Are you okay?!”
“I’m not surprised,” he says. I reflect back to each and every Sunday night he went to bed while I slithered secretly into my L Word world; the confession I’d made to him one year prior; the story of Karen and me that I shared with him one night after two bottles of wine; the look on Karen’s face when she first met Eric.
“We’re going to be fine,” he assures me.
“I love you,” I say, and mean it.
“I love you, too,” he says from the other end, thousands of miles away in the Iraqi desert. We hang up and I fall to the ground. It’s done. Relief. I say it out loud for the very first time. “I’m a lesbian.”
Awakenings: Navigating the Spaces between In and Out
Jeanette LeBlanc
Dear Abby,
Sometimes I fantasize about the girl down the hall in my dorm. Does that mean I’m gay?
Signed,
Confused in California
Dear Confused in California,
Fantasies are normal, a safe way of releasing and exploring our feelings. Having a same-sex fantasy does not mean you are a lesbian.
Signed,
Dear Abby
Whew. Relief. As long as “Dear Abby,” or Seventeen magazine, or Cosmo said it was normal, then it was normal and I was okay.
In a college full of boys, he is a man. We leave the smoky bar, with its blaring dance music and beat-up pool tables, and go back to my room. We lie on opposite ends of my creaky little twin bed and talk all night long. By the light of a votive candle we explore hopes and dreams and wishes and fears. As the hours pass, we inch closer and closer together until I can feel his breath on my cheek.
Sometime near dawn the thick glass of the candleholder finally gets too hot, and it explodes with a loud snap that slices through the silence in the dark room. Somewhere around the same time, we kiss.
It is that kiss that makes me fall in love.
The year after college, I met Susan one night in a bar with my fiancé and his school friends. We connected over our shared history in dance. I was immediately entranced, but when I was with her, I might as well have been invisible. Boys stared, girls stared, and I became the loyal sidekick. She was beautiful back then, incredibly so. She had long hair, light brown with flecks of gold, and it spiraled around her face in corkscrew curls-—a Pre-Raphaelite goddess.
I hadn’t thought about her in years.
Walking through a parking lot I heard someone call my name and looked up to see an unfamiliar woman walking toward me.
“It’s Susan . . . Susan Cookson.”
I felt a rush of relief as time melted away and I recognized the girl I once knew in the face of the woman she has become. We filled a few moments with the awkward chitchat of once casual friends who were now all but strangers. Then, as she walked away, it all came rushing back.
I wanted to be close to her. I didn’t fully understand it and was frightened by it, but I was drawn to her. I would have never dared give voice to these feelings outside of the darkest and safest corners of my soul, but I thought about her, dreamed about her, fantasized about her—illicit daydreams that stirred me in ways I was far too scared to fully contemplate.
She wasn’t the first. She wouldn’t be the last. In bed that night I remembered woman after woman. Different ages, different places, different feelings; all memories I had tucked away and never dared revisit. They filled me up and spilled over one another until I wanted to run, fast and hard and far, until my mind was quiet again.
I knew with utter certainty that no matter what happened, everything was going to change, and I was afraid.
Rebecca always had a power over me. I am aware of it, am wary of it. We are both masters of words, enjoy the power inherent in interactions that tantalize but never cross the line. I’m playing with fire, but pretend that I am safe.
One night we go out with a few friends. The food is sensual: crusty bread with savory brie, sweet fig and crisp green apples, organic greens with a tart vinaigrette, earthy red wine. We drink more at a nearby bar, fizzy peach drinks that dance in my mouth. We all go back to her place to swim. It’s almost dawn, and the water is cool.
We swim, splash, float under the desert moon. After a hot day and a long night, it is bliss to slip through the water. Later we sit on the edge of the pool, she says something sarcastic, and I laugh, reach up, and briefly twine my fingers through the back of her long curtain of hair. I pull my hand away quickly. Something about this touch is too intimate and I know it.
A few days later at dinner she asks, bluntly. Is there an attraction?
I cling to my heterosexuality, use it as a shield. I want desperately for it to be the truth that will save me from all of this. I’ve never had much of a poker face, and as she holds my gaze from across the table, I see my truth and my panic mirrored in equal measure in her eyes.
We leave the restaurant and return to her office. We sit close to one another on the edge of the futon where her clients sit, and we talk in hushed voices. My head pounds with the magnitude of this night. I cannot focus on the words passing between us, but I know that our hands will eventually connect. This is dangerous, but I cannot seem to make myself walk away. Nothing more transpires between us, but the feeling of her thumb grazing my palm feels more erotic and more forbidden than any sexual encounter I have ever had.
The next day there is a harshly written email; she is withdrawing from my life. In my backyard, I lean back against the weathered wooden fence and sobs roll through my body.
Later that night in our bed, he holds me for hours as I cry. Without question or expectation, he cradles me in his arms and lets my grief and fear pour out of me until the pillow is soaked with my tears. And at the end of all that, so filled with love and gratitude for the man who is my husband, what choice do I have but to trust?
And so I tell him. Everything.
Sean was leaving a local bar when the car pulled up. A young man got out of the car, the slur “faggot” flying from his mouth, an echo of the punch thrown by his hands. The fury behind that blow broke bones, and Sean flew back, fast and hard, against the pavement. The force of the impact caused his brain to ricochet inside his skull, separating from the brainstem. As Sean lay still on the pavement, the young man got back in his car and d
rove away.
Later, the assailant left a message for Sean’s friend: “You tell your faggot friend that when he wakes up he owes me $500 for my broken hand.”
Sean never got the message. He died.
My body is shaking. Bile rises in my throat and I feel dizzy, flushed, like I’m going to be sick. My eyes are stinging with trapped tears. I can’t breathe, can’t even see straight. The room blurs in a reaction so visceral and intense that it takes over my body and mind. I’m not prepared for it, don’t know how to recover, so I sit there reeling as a new and heavy sort of knowledge settles over me.
I sat on my sofa, laptop in my lap, and read Sean’s story, found by happenstance while browsing the Internet. Up until now, I had existed safely within the protective bubble of heterosexual privilege. It’s wasn’t the first time, of course, that I’d read a story like this. In the past I felt sadness, confusion, even outrage. But I felt it all from a distance, with a tacit understanding that that particular sort of hate was not reserved for people like me.
There was no distance now. I felt the hatred brand me, heard the words ringing in my ears, absorbed that sense of undesirable otherness into the deepest reaches of my soul.
And in that moment, Sean’s story became a part of my own.
“Are you straight?”
I’m standing in line at the bathroom of a random bar. I don’t know her, wasn’t expecting anyone to talk to me here.
I pause for a second, raise my head, and look her in the eyes.
I reply, quietly and firmly, “No. No I’m not.”
I can close my eyes and see her kneeling over me, looking down with intensity. Dark spiked hair, guarded blue eyes hiding years of hurt under a tough facade, freckled shoulders, multiple tattoos, pierced lip and tongue. Her hard edges and soft curves beckon me; make me want to know more. She is different from everything I have ever known.
I hear my heart pounding in my ears. Her small flat palm traces a slow, gentle path across my stomach, making me suck my breath deep into my core. My body is responding in ways I could not have imagined.
I don’t think I breathed again until morning.
That night, under her hands, I meet my body for the first time. I know, in that first instant, that I will never be the same. For hours upon hours I become fiercely alive, exist in my skin in a way I have never before experienced. Every sensation is heightened to a level of such intensity that I react on a level beyond physical, beyond mental, beyond emotional. I am beyond.
Ani DiFranco is playing, on continuous repeat, through the speakers in the ceiling. The music becomes the soundtrack of my awakening; the rhythms knit themselves into my expanding soul.
come here
stand in front of the light
stand still
so I can see your silhouette
I hope
you have got all night
’cause I’m not done looking at you yet
I know that I will never hear that song again without being taken back to this night, to the sweat and the sounds, the twisting current and the sense of perfect clarity in the midst of total disorientation.
There is a rawness and urgency that would have been frightening if it were not so perfectly, instinctively natural. There is no hesitation, no nervousness. The energy flows through me as if it always has.
Everything in my life has spiraled to this exact point in time. Spiraled to a point as sharp as the blade of a sword that slices into my skin and leaves the thinnest line of blood-red desire.
There are no spaces between us. The universe is spinning faster and faster, and so is my head. I taste salt on her skin. No world exists outside this room and I am lost and I am found, over and over and over again. I am dizzy with the newness and exquisite familiarity. My soul has already been here, I understand that now, it has just been waiting for me to find my way back.
She is trouble. I know it from the first moment I see her. She is trouble and she wants me and I should run far and fast in the opposite direction.
I need this. I need this to not be gentle. I need to be reckless. I need to be off balance. I need. I need. I need.
In random moments it floods back without warning. Like a quick punch in the gut I remember all that I have done, all that has been lost. The pain is so fierce I question how much I can take. And I wonder, will I ever feel whole and complete again?
I already find it hard to remember so much. The last time I kissed my husband. The last time we made love. All the other seemingly inconsequential moments that usually pass by unnoticed.
What about the last time we took the kids to the park? The last time we put groceries in the same cart? What was the last movie we watched together? Where did we go the last time we rode together in the car? When did we last say, “I love you”? When did I last lay my head against his chest and feel peace?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and sometimes I want to scream.
I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.
When did it end? Was there one specific final moment, or just a combination of lasts too numerous to count? If I had known that none of those things would happen again, how much longer would I have held on?
The psychic’s twinkling eyes and lilting British accent keep me mesmerized as I tentatively give him my birth date and lay my hands, palms up, on the table between us.
“The key is forgiveness,” he says. “You must forgive him for not being all that you need, and he must forgive you for not being all that he needs.”
And when I express my fears that he had moved into this new relationship before truly dealing with the end of our marriage he replies, “Ah, but he’s happy now. Isn’t that enough?”
I think it has to be.
“What are your fantasies?”
We are lying nestled together in bed. We fit so perfectly that I forget she hasn’t always been with me and doesn’t already know the answers to all the questions. My mind is blank, and I am surprised to find myself without a response.
I pull my eyes away from hers and look down at our bodies, a tangle of limbs atop a white down duvet. My eyes run across the smooth expanse of her back, her strong shoulders, the curve of her breasts, that perfectly formed space between her ribs and her hips. I lift my gaze once again to her golden brown eyes, and as my hand traces a path along her arm I am in awe at the almost unreal softness of her skin. I interlace my fingers with hers and experience a wave of deep contentment and a rush of exhilaration so interconnected that they feel like a single emotion.
This breathtaking sweetness and lightness—this is exactly what I wanted for so many years. It’s what I longed for, ached for, dreamed about, yearned to experience. Until recently I didn’t even let myself imagine that I could possibly live this, that it could ever be real. But it is real—aside from the births of my children, it is the most true and honest thing I have ever done.
Lying here with this woman (who somehow found me despite the fact that I wasn’t looking and was determined not to open myself to possibility)— this goes far beyond anything I could have imagined or dreamed or hoped for.
“This. This is my fantasy.”
And I lay my head against her shoulder, close my eyes, and breathe in the utter perfection of this moment.
I am on the floor of my bedroom closet. It is midnight and I keep the door closed so the sounds of my sobs will not be heard by anyone in the small two-bedroom apartment we now call home. Hot tears slide down my cheeks and emotions shake my body. I cry not just for tonight and tomorrow, but for all the countless moments of our lives when we will not be together. I cry for the reality that my daughters will forever be moving between two places, instead of resting securely in one. I cry for him and all that he has lost in the wake of my truth. I cry because the costs are so much higher than anyone could have possibly imagined. Self-pity, grief, and endless, all consuming guilt. It is a vicious combination.
It is Christmas Eve. Today I will say goodbye to my girls and send
them back to the house that never had a chance to become my home. When I kiss them goodbye I’ll know that I won’t be the one to help them put out cookies and milk for Santa. I won’t be there to remind them to include a carrot for the poor overworked reindeer. I won’t tuck them into bed, and kiss them on the nose and recite from memory the familiar words of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
I won’t be with them in the morning. I won’t see them open the presents I bought to fill their stockings, or see their reactions when they tear into their gift from Santa. I won’t hear their squeals of excitement or witness that gleam of magic in their eyes.
When the unraveling begins there is no way to predict where you’ll end up when the vortex finally ceases. You know, of course, that there will be collateral damage, but even the most somber imaginings don’t have the power to pull you from the necessity of just taking one more breath, one more step, of getting through just one more day.
If even the smallest of actions can alter the course of a lifetime, what of those that fracture a family? And what if you are the one who faced the truth, spoke the words, made the choice?
What then?
And so this is Christmas . . . and it won’t ever be the same again. But within the changes, within the loss, within the grief, perhaps there is beauty to be found, gifts of a different kind, wholeness hiding amidst the broken pieces.
All I can do is hope.
“Was it worth it?” she asks.
I get emails like this on a fairly regular basis. Other women in circumstances like mine; struggling to navigate seemingly impossible situations; trying to minimize pain and hurt; fighting for wholeness in a world broken by our own actions.
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 9
