Star Light, Star Bright

One night in sixth grade, I wished on a star the way my grandmother taught me to.

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight;

I wish I may, I wish I might

Have the wish I wish tonight.

And then, spoken so silently I was practically mouthing it, I wished that I would grow up to marry Mark. But life has a funny way of unravelling your expectations and revealing what you wished to pretend wasn’t there.

For most of my life, I wished more than anything that I could just reciprocate the feelings the boy in my French class told me he had for me. I tried so hard for so long. I dated a boy in high school but the thought of physical intimacy made my stomach churn. I made excuses to leave early, bailed on plans, and told him I was on my period every other week so we wouldn’t have to have sex. I thought I was a little bit broken. While my friends were having their first kisses with their first boyfriends, I wondered when it would click for me. When would I start thinking boys were cute? When would I find a boy to fall in love with? When would the idea of sex not make me want to hurl? I had good grades, my parents loved me, and I loved the way I looked in dresses, so I couldn’t be gay. Right? 

Years later, I met her. She is the smartest person I’ve ever spoken to, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and everything about her gives me butterflies. She makes me happier than I’ve ever been and I desperately want to shout it from the rooftops and tell everyone I’ve ever crossed paths with. But that option was taken from me. I’m jealous, and admittedly a little resentful, of couples who can hold hands in public or steal kisses in the park without making the news because a bigot beat them up. 

For months, I worked in a restaurant where politically conservative coworkers constantly talked about the ebbs and flows of their love lives. But I knew if I talked about the woman I had been head-over-heels for for almost a year, I could lose my job. The queer experience can be lonely, and there are inevitably experiences  that non-queer people will never understand. Having to come out every time you meet someone new for the rest of your life, being seen as a lesser human being by a hateful demographic, a severely restricted dating pool, the inability to experience random meet-cutes at a grocery store, being rejected by a community you devoted so much of your life to, and hearing casual or unintentional homophobia from the mouths of those you love. 

Coming to terms with my own sexuality was hard for entirely unexpected reasons. While I worried what others might think, I also mourned the grand narrative of a conventional life: marriage, kids, and old age the way I imagined it to be from an incredibly young age. Knowing that a single round of in vitro fertilization might run me up to thirty thousand dollars is like a punch to the gut. 

It is so exhausting to navigate a world where my sex life is seen as a statement. I’m in love, please just leave me alone. Please understand that loving a woman is not my active choice or a personified middle finger to conservative ideals. Not for lack of pride for who I am, but because I never considered a central tenet of myself - something so personal - to incite debate, fury, violence, hatred, or fear. It is me. It is us. I don’t want to think of myself as brave for kissing another woman. I do it because I want to enjoy a moment of connection with another individual but am devastated to know that is not a luxury I’m afforded. I cross all of my fingers and all of my toes that one day, I won’t be seen as sick, deviant, or immoral because I’m in love. 

At the end of the day, I’m so glad the cosmos never granted my will to marry Mark. But that realization was not easy to come by.

Illustration: Valerie Letts