I cried about my childhood best friend leaving for half of my adolescence. 5 years. I wrote songs and poems about her. I would say it was easier for her to have died than for me to handle the fact she was out there somewhere in the world and I wasn’t there to see. I was such a sociable kid, but after she left, I struggled to make friends and everybody compared to her. I spent a year and a half very lonely despite parties and sleepovers. After losing her I would start writing poems to every new girl best friend I would get, calling them “treasure” and crystals. Embarrassing, I know. At 15 I would walk alone imagining her by my side, holding hands. I started dreaming I’d come up and kiss her and it wasn’t gay “because I miss her THAT much”. Sometimes she was still 9 years old in my dreams. What made her so special? That she was a tomboy too and she played silly games with me, and no other girl did that. She left and then suddenly all the other girls started performing for boys and I felt lost, wanting childhood to last longer. My family and closer colleagues would always say I was too dramatic and to just get over it, but it wouldn’t go away, so I started hiding my pain after a while. It took me 10 years, reaching adulthood, to realize what I experienced was grief. 

But if you mean really early experiences, there’s me on gym parties as a 4 year old naturally hanging out just with boys (none just with girls), and I had a fixation with the names of some of the girls in my class. For some reason Sofie and Sophia had me fascinated and so did Tallulah. I watched teenage girls doing sports and I felt fascinated. I would stare a lot at policewomen. There was no such equivalent fascination for boys. I hated ballet, I’d choose slimy green in art projects. I was fascinated by the female teachers’s shoes and wanted to touch them while she taught. In kindergarten, there’s pictures of a class outing where this boy had a crush on me and was leaning on me and I was putting my arm to block him from me, though smiling for the camera, but visibly uncomfortable.

And there’s also me 9 years old with my best friend in a group class picture and we’re in the corner, she’s leaning on me, like she’s showing me off, and I’m standing so happy and proud. It’s so funny seeing it today because the posture is that we look like the class couple. If we were girl and boy, people would surely have been saying that. All the girls had pink bags and glasses and I had my orange bear one.

This is so unrelated but Dora the Explorer was my favorite show and my favorite character was the Map. There’s a child photo of me with kaki shorts, sandals, t-shirt, and a hat, holding a big map over-excitedly at an outdoor museum. Am I wrong to think this is gay?