“When did you first know you loved her?”
This is how the story I’m writing starts. How it starts in this moment. It may change.
It will change.
All my life, I’ve written stories. Sometimes on paper, or on the screen. More often stories written in my head. In my heart.
We live in systems that limit. Close us in. Writing is done for an audience. We must strive for best selling status. We must write our drafts and submit our work for the judgement of systems of publishing. Will our work be popular enough? Will our work make money for the system? If so, then yes, we can call ourselves writers. If not, we are deluded in vanity.
Yet my purpose is never to speak to the biggest audience. My purpose, always, to the individual.
Yet I’ve given too much time to writing as we are told writing is done. I am not interested in that game anymore.
I’ve never been interested in that game.
And so I begin to find my ways forward in sharing stories. In hearing stories. In discovery of all of our stories. Together.
I don’t know what will happen.
I don’t know how to begin.
So all I can do
Is begin.
"When did you first know you loved her?”
Orielle asked me this while we
sat
on the bench
two women in our long friendship
near
the tree, singing his song the setting sun reflecting orange red pink off the
bellies of the whales swimming so high in the sky
How do I answer a question like that? When did I fall in love with Eddie? We’d been friends for so long. We’d had so many conversations. Shared so much of our hearts. Was it a moment,
after another conversation, deep into our hearts laid bare,
when
she looked
away?
glanced back
a blush
Some thought in her heart of
an us
together,
different than the us of our deep friendship?
I guess, if I have to put a date on the moment, it was the morning of our trip to the coast. We travelled, in those days, to remember Andromeda together. We were meeting another friend later. But in the morning, I woke to Eddie facing me in bed. I remember laughing at the way she looked at me so intently. A soft laugh. Me saying, “What?” without words. And her, reaching out, running fingers along the rough whiskers of my jawline, my cheek, my chin. Her thumb running along the bristle on my upper lip.
We’d slept together before.
Made love?
No.
That’s too exalted for what we did. We fucked. Friends. That’s
all it was.
that’s all
that’s all.
But on that day, something different. I hated the whiskers I could not get rid of. I shaved every morning. Again in the evening if I was going out. In the evening if I thought I might get spicy with another woman.
But that morning. That morning. The way she touched me. The way her eyes shone. Glistening. Tears? A smile breaking through? In that moment all she was was heart.
Was that the moment I fell in love? Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe, had it not been for what followed, it would have just been another moment of a glance away, a glance back, a blush in a long life of friendship.
And that’s how my story begins. In this moment. I play with form. With where, with how to present. Social media? TikTok? (I include, here, a short video of me telling a variation of the beginning of the story. Spoken fiction.) Some other way? Zine? Self publish chapter by chapter? The joy is in the playing, the discovery. The joy is to begin.
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