by Allya Yourish

1. There has been an abundance of thinly veiled yearning. Yearning as a constant state of being. Yearning as the whole story, the story itself being a validating box to tick off—yes yes, yes I had a gay childhood, see these early homosexual yearnings. Of course, I didn’t know I was yearning. I would be an entirely different person if I had known the definition of desire sooner. Instead I kissed boys and thought about where my hands were supposed to go. Thought about what noises were right to make. 
2. I kissed a girl in my doorway last night. She was there, insistently present under my lips and her body was against my body. Her hands found my waist and I didn’t think about anything else and we were like that for some time. After, she pressed her forehead to mine and the intimacy made my heart stutter.
3. Olivia and I in the playtent that fit in her bedroom, our shirts off, nine years old, thin shouldered. Massaging each other’s backs in studied motions, soft lights, soft music, lotion. Touch was currency. It was a game until it wasn’t. But what are the words for that? Skin so young, as innocent as anything. But touching, always touching. 
4. Alice’s backyard an overgrown haven for everything wild and alive. Aged seven. We would hide back there and worship a small white cherubic statue we rescued from an unappreciative adult. We formed a cult around the statue, just the two of us and its plaster grin. Like we were the only people alive. 
5. New College’s annual stoplight party. I am a freshman and I am wearing green, which means I would like someone to kiss me. My friends are a sea of cautious yellow, reluctant red. I am dressed up like Tinkerbell, including the wings. Sabrina walks by in her trademark red lipstick and I do not remember the color she was wearing, but I asked and she said yes, she said yes, and I kissed a girl for the first time. Texted a friend later, she asked me how it was, I told her I had to try it again to know. I kept trying again, all night.
6. The following spring, Joan is to star in Kara’s thesis play and I am the love interest. Joan and I kiss on stage, brief, awkward. Kara asks that we rehearse more, Joan offers to do some kissing practice in the hallway. We disappear for two hours. The space between our bodies occupied by laughter. I didn’t know what this meant. Kara claimed it was the best thing we could’ve done for the show, afterwards, told us that we were much more believable. 
7. Athena in a small bar in the Latin Quarter. Her eyes light up like she is hearing a joke, like she knows the punchline. Tequila in her hand. I watch her suck a lime wedge and question my internal dictionary’s definition of pornography. Later, with her at a quieter bar in the Marais, her lips stained with red wine. She laughs so easily, so unselfconsciously, it is as if joy comes to her easily. I buy an umbrella from a vendor on the street, it is a midtoned purple and it has so many holes in its plasticky fabric that drops keep falling down her face. 
8. We are dating before I know we are dating, Lily leaves me notes at my thesis carroll and spends hours in cafes across from me. And then we are at the bayfront one night and it is so dark all around us that the stars make our faces legible. And then it is raining, and the rain pings off of the surface of the bay and the bioluminescence lights up a blue ripple where each drop hits, and we are laughing because the moment is beautiful and we are laughing because we are beautiful, and I know immediately that I am dating her and will keep dating her and we are touching we are kissing. And it rains all night, until we are dripping.
9. Danielle is two years older than me and is always the lead in our high school’s fall play and spring musical. She writes music, puts an album out on iTunes before graduating. I listen to the album enough to learn every word of it, quietly carry the secret that I am her biggest fan, say nothing of it to anyone, wish only that she would look at me more often. Her senior year, I work on costumes for the Importance of Being Earnest and spend each night before the show brushing her hair, pinning it into a Gibson Girl bun. I do my job as slowly as I can. I tell myself I would really like to be her friend.
10. Eliza kisses me in an elevator in Iowa City. She pulls on my belt loops until I am closer, until I am against her, and suddenly my body is a magnet and it is flush with hers and unrelenting and then the elevator dings and– 
11. I can trace a crooked path from woman to woman, lesson to lesson. Newly in the Midwest and entirely alone, I am heartbroken over queer love, I find myself struggling to justify who I am, what I want. Lesbian, it feels, is a relational identity. In yearning for a lover, I affirm that I love, that I will be loved by a woman.
12. We are talking quite a bit about wanting, her and I. The girl I kissed last night. My phone lights up with her name, Taylor, and there’s something new since the kissing, a vulnerability that comes with the nakedness of met desire. I want to be kissing you, something I get to say now, now that I have kissed her before. Now that she has kissed me.