Page 36 of That Summer Feeling

Michelle it was.

She sat on the couch in our common area with headphones and her laptop, doing work before anyone could catch her and get upset. Except me, I guessed. But she seemed to know I’d never get upset with her.

I tapped her on the shoulder. “Do you have a second?”

“Sure.” She took off her headphones. There was a frame of an orphanage up on her screen.

“I’m an asshole,” I said, looking at it. Michelle with her real, important job, and me moving through the world like a contestant onThe Bachelor, ready to unload my big special feelings without a moment’s notice. “It’s not important. Never mind.”

“Please. Stop me from spending my time on this. I need someone else to do it, because clearly I will not.”

“Michelle, stop spending your time on this! I’ve been telling you over and over!”

She closed her laptop with a definitive smack. “Thank you. What’s up?”

“How do you know when you like someone? Like, romantically?” I asked before I could second-guess how ridiculous it sounded to look another adult in the eye and inquire about one of life’s most commonly experienced sensations. Especially since the first thing I’d ever told her was that I was divorced. Clearly love was not new territory for me.

Michelle did not react like it was an absurd thing to ask. Instead she leaned back to think it over, a dreamy look on her face as she combed through her own memories. “For me, it’s always when I’m in a place without them,” she said. “If I notice that they’re gone, or I miss what they’d add to something. That’s usually when I realize I’m in trouble. Even if I see someone at a party who I think is cute, and they leave before I get a chance to know them, I’m like, ‘Damn.’ Basically, I have to lose you to realize I want you around.”

For some reason I’d hoped her words might resonate less. Instead she managed to double down on what I already knew. The second I’d met Stevie, I’d spent the rest of the time looking for ways to be around her. Hating every moment I wasn’t. She snuck into my heart unannounced and staked a claim to land I didn’t realize was up for grabs. I swore I’d closed myself off, and she’d found a broken gate and walked right through, not even bothering to announce herself.

“Yeah, totally,” I said to Michelle, trying to keep it in.

Before Stevie, there had been an obvious set of parameters to my romantic attractions. I liked men because that was what I’d always seen as the obvious choice for me to make. I knew a lot of queer people, and the certainty with which they’d decided upon their queerness intimidated me. They spoke of knowing it since childhood, understanding they were different before they could even articulate how. I never felt like I knew anything about myself for certain.

My resistance to committing to one way of being now seemed doubly obvious in retrospect. Not all paths set out for me were ones I had to travel. That’s what I’d told myself when I’d first ignored the Mason vision all those years ago at the airport. I knew I had the ability to go in any direction with it, and I chose to go toward being a nice woman who married a nice man at a reasonable age, settling down in a nice house to live a nice life. There were always other roads available. It didn’t matter if I never took them. They existed. They were real.

I was real.

I liked men. And women. Anyone, really. And I hadn’t let myself hold space for it, because I’d been so obsessed with ticking off boxes for the life I thought I needed to have that I didn’t pay much attention to the life Iwantedto have.

Michelle clocked my withholding right away. She moved her laptop from the tops of her thighs to a safer spot on the coffee table so she could sit up straighter. “Why? Do you like someone here?”

“I might,” I said.The understatement of the year.

Michelle wiggled her fingers together. “Oh! Can I guess who?”

If she guessed Mason, I feared I might scream. If she guessed Stevie, I feared I might cry. Because if it was that obvious to someone else, how hadn’t I seen it? Why didn’t I know myself enough to know this was who I was? Who I’d always been?

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I told her honestly. She nodded like she understood. “Knowing myself is fucking complicated.”

She laughed heartily at that. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s scary, taking risks.”

“It doesn’t really get easier either.”

“Probably because the older we get, the more we realize just how much opportunity there is to fail,” I said.

“But there’s also so much life we miss out on when we hold ourselves back,” she responded. “You can never get those moments back. The best you can do is be truer to yourself going forward.”

“You’re really right.”

“Do you know what’s true to me right now?” she asked. The moment felt really important. I wanted to say something profound. Unfortunately, nothing profound came to mind. “I’m hungry,” she said, filling the gap of silence.

I had to laugh. “And here I thought we were having this soul-deep conversation!”

“Sometimes having breakfast is the deepest thing you could possibly do,” she told me.