I met her when I was 21. I may have had quick kisses before then, but she was the one that tipped the balance. I want to write her name, but because this column is only about me and my irksome lie I’ll opt instead for the lawyer speak of “X”. After all, it is the relevant chromosome and it ends a great three-letter word.
I needed a catalyst, an inspiration – someone to catapult me out of my comfort zone. She was no maverick and no revolutionary, but I saw her for the first time in a summer of parties and was hypnotised. I asked her later if she’d seen me, and she hadn’t. At another party, we were introduced briefly. She was drunk, I wasn’t; I remembered, she didn’t. Again, she haunted me and when I tried too many times to remember her changing face, it disintegrated leaving only unanswered questions. When we finally did get talking (party no. 3) we got on famously. The X-encounter had begun.
At that time, I was making an art out of existing in two different places at the same time. In one, I was a student bumbling along, sitting exams, drinking bad cocktails and learning to be a certain version of myself. In another, I was in the shadows, a place with no time, no real shape and a mist of shame around my feet. This was my closet – and in there, I could only make erratic grabbing motions for the door or lean pathetically on the sides. I was nowhere near acknowledging this other place. I needed my amorphous desire to take human shape, something beyond me and my limited understanding. I needed X. There were, however, rare moments of self-knowledge when I just got bored of my own prissy lies. That’s when I went to the other extreme and the exhibitionist was unleashed.
We first kissed (party no. 3) with the help of alcohol – that great easer – and in front of about fifty people. It was never meant to be that public, but soon we stopped noticing the others. In our minds, it was a midnight tryst in a lost forest, but in reality there was a stampede as people rushed to the dance floor led by the rallying cry: “It’s two birds! Kissing!” It wasn’t one of my classiest moments, but I couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t think about the fifty people until the next day when someone brandished a disposable camera, asking me if I really hadn’t noticed that one had been left on each table in the marquee to commemorate the evening. I never did find out if anyone immortalised us, but somewhere out there, there may well be a dog-eared photo of our disgraceful duet.
We left the dance floor, and carried on – much to the delight of our temporary audience. The pheromones had taken over. I was a little too drunk to remember the first kiss, other than in the blurred slow motion of a hangover, but at the time, it felt strong enough to change ocean currents and shift tectonic plates.
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My few months of X may well have been cataclysmic for closeted me, but really, it was just a student fling. It was an intense friendship, but not much in terms of lesbian emancipation. We travelled to see each other, we shared London a little and when I had to leave to go abroad for a year, we wrote impassioned letters. It was a cliché but it felt so real – and it impinged on everything I did. I walked around the new city for hours thinking of her; I sat in windows longing; I played a starring role in my own melodrama, but still I wasn’t able to give those feelings a name.
It was romantic and heavily romanticised by us both, but sadly it turned out to be the sexual equivalent of window-shopping – and it ended in tears. She was gorgeous but she wasn’t gay, and it wasn’t as if I had any courage or convictions to follow. X wasn’t the missing piece of the jigsaw, but she certainly made the picture clearer. The puzzle of heterosexual me could have been boxed and put away right then, but still I went on to have one more boyfriend, still I lied to myself and evaded questions from friends who knew about X.
Was it cowardice, bravery or impatience that made my shadow self take the first steps that night – or was it just alcohol and a heady summer? Either way, the wobbly, insecure creature was forced into the limelight – and after years of just flashing the occasional leg or tantalisingly draping one arm out of the closet, she debuted on a dance floor in a rampant, public fashion. No wonder I rushed back into the closet at the first opportunity.