Sitting in a dusty field surrounded by inebriated, sunburned festivalgoers dancing in thong bikinis and assless denim chaps to “Temperature” by Sean Paul, I confessed my crush.
It didn’t happen as I had planned. My stomach was swirling, and the loud music was distracting. I dropped my water bottle to hide my shaking hands. More importantly, I was 31, not 14. I was nearly two decades too late.
Frances was an old high school friend. We lost touch a few years after college, and reconnected virtually over a shared love of pop star Chappell Roan’s rise to fame and our upcoming trip to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival.
We caught up on years of history and past relationship woes, and everything spilled out of me at once. After years of dwelling on our short, intense friendship and not knowing if what I had felt then was all in my head, I couldn’t help myself.
“I had a huge crush on you,” I admitted to her, my breath catching at the last syllable. “I just didn’t realize it until a few years ago.”
I’m a cisgender woman married to a cisgender, heterosexual man. I only recently began explicitly acknowledging and exploring my bisexuality. Throughout my 20s, it was easier to ignore this side of myself and lean into my heteronormative identity … until it wasn’t anymore.
I grew up shy, Baptist and conservative in the suburbs of a midsize city in the Southeast. Teachers and church members told me not to dress in a way that would cause men to “stumble.” Well-meaning family told me I would make a wonderful wife and mother someday. The few out, gay men in my school were bullied and mocked. Bisexual women were sexualized.
It was safer and easier to accept my attraction to men and push down that part of me that kept asking, “Are you sure that’s it?”
And then there was Frances. She was brilliant, funny and several inches shorter than me. She always wore her hair in a ponytail, but I remember staring when she let her dark curls down.
I was painfully…
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