Tierra Christina Montgomery
The First Feelings of Love
First published by Tierra Christina Montgomery 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Tierra Christina Montgomery
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Tierra Christina Montgomery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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First edition
Editing by Dr. Lisa Montgomery
Illustration by Sasa Milosevic
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Contents
A Letter to My Readers
Background: The Beginning
Reasons Why I Liked May
Missing May Zhao
The Inkling Feeling That Never Went Away.
Sexuality and Sexual Orientation
The Second Person I Told
Thank You For Understanding Grandmother
Not Knowing the Person Will Reciprocate
Just A Crush Or A Full Blown Relationship
Showing That I Care
Accepting My Own Sexuality
Background: Seeking Solace and Praying
God and Christine
How Do You Show Love?
Today I Failed At Loving You
Thinking of May
A Possible Love Triangle
In Light of Troubles
May’s Love Language
Resilience
Always Ask, Never Expect
Background: A Time to Remember
Processing the Internship
She is beautiful.
Processing Being a Lesbian
Processing Being In A Relationship
I Realized Your Feels Were True
Dreaming Of You
Summer Endings
Love Is Like Traveling
Epilogue: Twenty-five and Thriving In A Different Type of Love
About the Author
One
A Letter to My Readers
Dear Reader,
I hope this message finds you well. I was twenty-one years old when I started my coming out process. I was a love struck person hit on the head when love arrived. I almost did not know what to do with myself. But it is in my hopes that you learn from my mistakes, my misgivings of what love is suppose to look like and how love finds its way to you when you least expect it. Some of these journal entries or “writings”, as I like to call them, come from the year 2015, while some of the writings are a reflection and was written in 2019.
Four years wound up giving me enough time to reflect on what the relationship meant to me as someone going through their first relationship at that time and age. Hopefully, you will learn a lot about how tricky it is to navigate having feelings for someone and the uncertainty of it all. Hopefully, you will see that love was still there even during the rocky times.
Sincerely,
Christine Davis
Two
Background: The Beginning
My name is Christine Davis and I just had gotten accepted into an internship over the summer at NSA. This company is in Maryland and holds an internship for promising college students every summer.
During that stay, I learned many aspects of Information Technology and many aspects of being in a relationship. We would tackle many aspects of security from securing client information to analyzing client information. It represented a time where at twenty-one, I had to grow up in so many different ways. I had to learn how to negotiate where I would be headed everyday to get to my internship and what assignments were a priority to work on. In this relationship, I learned how to care for someone. I learned how May was and what she liked in that short period of time. It was intense and stressful. This stressed stayed with me even when I was not on the job. I was worrying all the time about little things and overthinking assignments. This job was a big learning curve for me.
May Zhao was my roommate along with Yulonda Ruiz and Jenny Wheeler. Yulonda and May had gotten along with each other very well. But it was with May that I felt a special connection. It was different being around her, learning from her, and hearing what went on in her day. Jenny was a cool person, we did not talk to each other much. Yulonda, Jenny and I happen to work in the same technology field, while May worked in the language field.
These past three months taught me a lot about my own sexuality and what it meant to show someone I cared for them. It was not perfect, there were some fights, but in all it did not stop me from feeling how I felt about May. My own sexuality opened up because of her, which is something I also was not expecting. I grew to understand more about myself through my sexuality and being able to express those feelings towards my family and being in a relationship with her.
* * *
The first time I met May Zhao, I was just coming in from buying groceries and she was sitting on the couch in the living room.
“Hi, I am May Zhao.” she said as she stood up for a hug.
“Hi, I am Christine Davis.” I said placing the groceries down on the table before meeting her to take the hug.
“I hope you don’t mind me getting groceries early.”
My dad and I went into the apartment early to set my suitcase down, choose a room and pick a bedroom out to stay. There were four roommates total and two to each room. May Zhao and I happen to be sharing a room.
“So I guess I will leave you two to unpacking and putting the groceries up.” Dad paces as he sets the last of the groceries on the table, kisses my forehead, and heads down to the car to leave.
“I love you Dad. See you in a few weeks.” I say starting to put the groceries up.
“So how are we going to divide things up.” I start to say, hesitant of getting groceries so early after all.
“Well, we kind of have to wait and see before the others get here. So let’s leave them there.”
Good thing I did not buy any cold cuts or milk. Most of the groceries happen to be pantry items, like cups of uncooked rice and Ramen Noodles.
Not long after we set into the room to unpack our bags, we begin getting to know each other.
“I do not have any siblings, but just a dad and a mom.” May says as she begins unpacking.
“I have a younger brother and my dad stays up here for his job, while my mom stays in North Carolina. They are divorced.”
As the conversation keeps going, we steady unpack our bags and settle into the room. She taking the left half of the room, while I take the right half of the room.
After unpacking, I get a call from my Da
d saying he wanted to meet me again.
“Oh, hey. Sorry to cut the conversation short, but my Dad needs me again.”
“Okay.”
I then head out with my Dad as we pick up some more items that I had forgotten and tell him exactly what I needed for clothes since I just finished unpacking them. As we rode in the car, we discussed the prospects of the job and my first impressions of May Zhao and the internship.
“I’m pretty nervous about this internship, Dad.”
“Don’t be. You will do a great job.”
“Thanks. I guess it’s just my first time really feeling like a grownup taking on this job. It was so different from the other internships in Indiana and North Carolina that I am feeling like a guppy in an aquarium.”
“You have to learn how to swim at some point in your life. So this must be the opportunity to do so.” Dad reassures me as we continue to drive in the car.
We then begin to talk about other things to ease my mind off the job that will be taking place over the summer. After that trip to the grocery store and to the department store, he drops me off at the apartment. From there, I met my other two roommates Yulonda and Jenny.
Three
Reasons Why I Liked May
Reasons Why I Like You
You are kind to people.
I like how you viewed yourself.
You are pretty even without makeup.
You know how to talk to people and enjoy bonding.
You are neat.
You really considerate of other people.
You are passionate about your job.
You take risks.
Your smile brightens up the room.
You love God.
You are not afraid to tell it like it is.
You know how to enjoy the differences in other people.
You have a funny bone!
You are health conscience.
You value family.
You pursued what you liked.
You are diligent.
You like to be outgoing.
You enjoy swimming.
You know how to make the most out of a moment.
Four
Missing May Zhao
I did not think I would be missing someone so much after the summer had ended. Three months had passed since the summer and I was still feeling like I did not have closure with May. When someone does not respond to your text messages or phone calls, it is best to leave them alone. And I guess I took this the hard way because I did not know how to handle loving someone so hard, but then not being able to talk with them or have the relationship continue after being with each other for three months. But I did have her as a Facebook friend and did not want to scare off the opportunity of still knowing what was going on in her life if I had used Facebook Messenger as a last resort to talk with her. It is hard to see now that maybe if I was open it would have hurt more because of how I take being open with someone versus being casual with someone. But even despite not talking with her after all those months, I wrote this writing in October 2015 because I still had feelings and hoped that there would be a way to contact her at the time. This writing was never shown to her, but it was just a way to get my feelings down on paper and express how I really felt.
* * *
But is it okay to miss her? To still think about her? Is it okay to have songs and writings about her? To realize what she has meant in my life since then? Is it okay to still reference her? To still love her even if she is gone? Is it okay to tell yourself after all this time to still miss her? That you know you should have moved on by now, but not too soon?
It is okay to move on. To know that maybe I cannot go back. That our paths were meant to cross that one time. To be shown something. And maybe I still want that. Was not looking for it, but the relationship opened my eyes. And maybe that was just the right time. And now I miss her. I want to be around her. I want us to be on swing sets and monkey bars like kids and forget about the world. I want to get to know what she wants. What’s in that head of hers? I want to cherish her time. And is that too much to ask? Is it too far-fetched? To always long for something. Pray about something, even if people doubt about it. Even if they think it should have never worked in the first place? And will I ever be in another relationship again? I don’t know. Maybe.
But time will only tell. And maybe to others, we were not right for each other. Maybe to others we were a bunch of wrongs. But to me, she was a right. And I now realize what and how I could have been better. She taught me that. She taught me how to always be kind, showed me what a simple gesture could mean to someone. What spending time with someone looks like. And I don’t care what people say. She still meant something to me. She still made my heart flutter and my palms sweat when I used to walk by her or be around her. How she used to smile, and straighten her hair. How she strutted across the room and always made coffee in the morning.
But she had shown me what loving another person looks like. She had shown me how to spend time. She had shown me what it means to want to be home. To get a chance to see her before she left.
Is it wrong to still think about her all this time? That maybe I have not moved on in that part of my life? Still hoping one day to see her? And maybe it should not be? If I had seen her, things would be different. Maybe it would have taken 20 years for us to be in the right place again. Or maybe we just fit within the three months we have known each other.
But I am grateful to still have been with her.
And maybe people don’t think so because in the end it did not work out. Or maybe we were just too different. But now I am seeing that it did not matter if we were different or had the same last name, that love transcends all of that because it is about getting to know the person first. And maybe we did it backwards. Loved all too hard, too deeply and so soon without taking a real look at each other.
Maybe we fit only for that short time.
That sucks.
Five
The Inkling Feeling That Never Went Away.
As a kid it was simple, boys had cooties and other girls were destined to be best friends. But as I got older, girls turned into women and boys turned into men. Men still had cooties, but other women were seen as something more.
It started with an inkling when I was young, but I pushed it as far down from my mind as possible.
But this inkling feeling never went away. It laid dormant inside me until it came fumbling out of me like a Jack-in-the-Box.
That inkling feeling surfaces, resides, and then resurfaces again. My sexuality has not always been a subject to talk about, but lately I have had to deal with this inkling feeling head on.
No hiding behind a mask of heteronormativity. Of wishing I could like a man the same way I like a woman.
But here it was front and center staring in my face. This inkling feeling saying, “Here I am!” all loud and clear.
And where was I to go, but take it for what it was and realize that part of myself.
This inkling feeling was here to stay and now has set its home within me.
* * *
“Dad, I have something to tell you.”
We were riding in the car from the airport on the way to the hotel. I just had gotten accepted into the final rounds of the internship and they needed to see me in person to conduct an interview.
“So, I am a lesbian.” I quacked.
“You know I always had an inkling that you were different in that way.”
“Really? How could you tell?”
“It was just some mannerisms and how you played with dolls. You know the little things.”
“Well, I’m in shock. I have been battling this feeling for a while on my own and you are the first person I told.”
“Well, I am glad you could confide in me of something so confidential.”
“Yes sir. It’s a big relief.”
“Now we just need to talk about being safe when it comes to meeting someone. It is always wise to use precaution and be aware of what hap
pens when it comes to practicing safe sex.”
“Okay, Dad. But I do not think I am to the safe sex part yet, just coming to terms with the sexuality part.”
“But it’s important to know all these items ahead of time and to be aware because you never know.”
The first person I had confided my sexuality to had gone smooth. It had left me with a weight off my shoulders and a proud person. Also, the timing of this internship and being able to see him in person provided a lot of relief as well because I was not alone. I had someone in my corner close by that could help me when I needed it.
Six
Sexuality and Sexual Orientation
Sexuality can be fluid. It does not come in this tight, rigid box as I once thought. Some religions believe that there should only be love or a relationship between a man and a woman. I grew up being a part of one of those religions. But come to find out, people can identify how they feel personally inside or what aligns to their lifestyle. Even on television and social media, there is even more representations of LGBTQ+ people.
I could not imagine being so brave and coming out to the public like that. Not only was there a fear of God not loving me, but if my family would accept me. This inkling tells me I am different. That my own sexuality is not the same as the Bible stories. That my love could be the same, just not of the same gender. I have not thought about it much in that way before. Could my love for the same gender be the same as my counterparts, even though we do not share the same sexuality? Even then, how would I begin to explain that my sexuality has changed or become more defined? How could I explain sexuality to others who look at it differently?
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