Two decades, vanilla swirl

November 10, 1986. Twenty years ago. The day I first truly kissed a woman, melted into the soft richness of enfolding, silky female skin, the culmination of years of yearning, weeks of breath-held flirtation with T.

There had been crushes before T, but when she arrived in my MA program that September -- urban, playful, charming -- she'd embarked on a chemistry-filled, mercury-slippery courtship of me that had only one inevitable conclusion. A rose in my mailbox, notes on post-its in invisible ink on my TA office door, scraps of poetry.

I went away for a weekend at the end of October to visit D and found myself buying T a pad of tiny, colourful origami squares. Flutters of notes on the squares soon appeared in my mailbox, on my door, in my books. Zooming close, skittering away. She had a boyfriend, back in Toronto, a stolid sort of guy, but she’d acknowledged a couple of affairs with women, a trip to the famed Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. One night in early November, breath held, I’d agreed to her offer of a shoulder massage. I lay under her fingers, unable to make the tiny gesture that would affirm what we both knew was time-honoured seduction, both of us suspended in desire that we couldn’t name.

For two days, I walked around, no other thought but wanting to touch her, paralyzed with the inability to imagine how I could make that happen without risking… I didn’t know what, everything, in some ways. She invited me over for supper, we made a stirfry, then she asked if I wanted to sleep over. This wasn’t the first sleepover for us, and it was something I did with other girlfriends – but I knew this was different. In pyjamas, in the dark, she whispered, “I want to kiss you.” Exhaling, I uttered “me too.” I found her lips and skin, unbelievably soft, yielding, opening to me.

The trajectory on T was predictable -- two months of utter devotion, a tearful return to her guy and her "real" identity and life, another year or so of come here/go away clutching at each other. Such drama, such yearning.

And since then...two decades of identifying, mostly, as a dyke -- skirmishes with men interludes, not the landscape of home. And now, the psychogeography shifted, completely. Like emigrating a second time, looking backwards from the deck of the swiftly moving ship, wind whipping my scarf around, fond of the shore I'm leaving, humming an anthem of a new undiscovered land. "I'm your America?" F laughed at me when I mused this image at him. I just smiled lazily, waiting for a Whitman-like declaration of electric desire.

When I flicked through the comments I'd missed on this blog, some Anonymous someone had posted something very provocative in response to my "most heterosexual thing I've ever done" post back around Thanksgiving, the post about buying F a tie at Harry Rosen: "Sometimes it can be daring, even counter-cultural to frame an act as heterosexual; it all depends on your culture. Which begs the question: what's the most vanilla thing you've ever done?"

An excellent question, and entirely contextual, and probably none of the answers utterable in a blog members of my family read.Even the most porous girl has some boundaries. But F does joke about the subversity with which I greet even the most "missionary vanilla" of heteronormative acts, from bed to handing over one of his shirts to a hotel staffer for cleaning.

Suspended between cultures, nothing feels vanilla, it's all boundary-crossing and an overlay of constant questions. Awareness of the veneer of privilege offhandedly accorded me when that hotel staffer calls me Mrs F's Last Name, when we hold hands or kiss in a restaurant. Awareness of the privilege of perspective I have from living in so many territories, feeling as deeply and resignedly the anti-marriage successes in Tuesday's US election as my queer friends. Gratitude that at the end of the day, no one in my immediate space much cares about the gender of the person I seem to be beginning to make a life path with.