Girlfriend.

As a very young child, I vividly remember informing my mother that I was going to marry a “lady”. To her credit, she didn’t pass out or collapse or wash my mouth out with soap – but she did inform me that “girls don’t marry girls, they marry boys”. I was absolutely devastated. Shattered. Horrified that I was going to have to marry a BOY. I suspect her calmness was based on my recent education (at preschool) about “boys and cooties” and “the cootie lock” and my explosion of tears over dinner one night when I thought I was “infected”.

The truth is that, throughout my life, I was never quite sure whether I’d end up ‘married’ to a girl or a boy, only that I was fine with either one. (For some of you, this is totally shocking news, and I apologize – but, uh, it’s not something I regularly discuss with coworkers.)

The first girlfriend I ever had was a friend before anything else. We met in Brownies when I was six and she was seven and we were forced to work together on nearly every project as a result of our mothers’ friendship. Ella was almost a foot taller than me even then, and I suspect that she’s around 5’11″ now that she’s all grown up. We spent a lot of time swapping books, talking about what we were going to be when we grew up, and riding our bikes to the corner store to buy huge paper bags of candy.

Parents worry excessively when boys are around their pubescent daughters, but they don’t blink for a moment when two girls are locked in a bedroom giggling for hours on end. Neither of our parent-sets had the slighest idea that we were more than ‘just friends’.

It started harmlessly with both of us determined (in a very Judy Blume way) to learn how to “kiss”. One of us would hold a kleenex over her lips and the other would lean in and smoosh around a bit, careful not to touch actual flesh or get saliva on the other. Ella was always the more cautious one, careful to hold the kleenex in the right place, careful to kiss gently, always asking whether she was “doing it right”. I was the first to take the kleenex away and demand that she kiss me “for real” because, after all, there wouldn’t be any kleenex when a boy kissed us, right? And it began. I have memories of hiding, naked, in a closet when her mother’s footsteps were suddenly heard advancing toward her bedroom door during one of our times together. To this day, I have no idea how Ella explained my sudden disappearing act. There was no alternate exit from the bedroom.

Our relationship waxed and waned over the years, contrary to my relationships with men – all of which started dramatically and ended explosively. It never occured to me, living in the middle of nowhere as I did, that our relationship could ever be “out in the open”. I had never heard the word lesbian, and I knew that I liked boys, too. When I was older and understood, Ella wouldn’t discuss it. I began to date, to experiment with boys, but each time I crashed and burned with a guy, Ella and I would just pick up where we left off. It wasn’t until her last year of high school that she began dating – a restriction placed on her by her parents.

Ella, reluctant to be in a relationship with another girl or to admit to doing the things we did, did her best to view everything as “experimentation”. To this day, I wonder if she truly believed it. No matter how many times we were naked, rolling around together wrapped in a sleeping bag, or how many times I lowered my mouth to her stomach and below – it meant only that we were practicing for the next man who came along. Keeping our bodies warm, if you will. In later years, when we both understood that what we were doing was “sex”, we both still lived at home and sent each other love notes in code. It was only a few years ago that I realized that she, too, felt something more than experimentation.

I haven’t seen her since shortly after my mom died – 1993 or 1994 – when she said something to offend me and I, without a moment’s hesitation, hacked away the friendship the way one normally prunes a plant. Swift and painless on my side, but who knows about the plant? Our relationship had been in decline for some time before that – a case of one-upmanship, a case of me leaving home to live in Toronto while she continued to live with her parents, a case of differing friendship needs, or a combination of everything. Sometimes life just draws people apart, y’know?

It is, however, her body that springs to mind whenever I picture “naked woman” – despite other lovers beyond her and access to porn and and a solid understanding of women’s bodies in media. Her body was my first real understanding of “woman” – she wasn’t my mother (who I saw naked on occasion and who was, as far as I was concerned, competely asexual) and she wasn’t the women in the magazines hidden in my Dad’s workshop.

I suppose it explains, in part, why my preference in women is for curves – with soft bodies and hip bones buried under flesh – though I can, of course, appreciate nearly any form (male or female). If you believe that first experiences dictate much of our later sexual proclivities, it also makes sense of why I prefer sex that’s somewhat adventurous – not well-thought out, but a mash of bodies coming together unexpectedly. Men who aren’t macho. Women who are butch. Pretty boys and scary girls. Girls in pink and boys in blue. It’s all good.

I always find it strange, though I realize it’s not, to consider being attracted only to men or only to women. Both bodies are capable of so much pleasure, so much comfort, so much expression – as different as they may be in form. And love, love just is.