Invitation

The first time I really tell someone, the words belong to her, like me and everything else in the world. We are alone, and I don’t remember where the rest of our friends are. Or maybe we aren’t alone and all of our friends are with us, but I can only ever think of her.

“I’m bisexual,” she says, from just a few steps ahead of me.

She says it so casually in that way she always does, in the same kind of tone she might use to mention a café she wanted to go to or point out an interesting bird she saw perched on a telephone wire above us. She says it like it means nothing. All I have to do is respond.

“Oh! Me too,” I say too quickly, in a kind of overexcited way that makes me feel foolish.

I always tell myself that I haven’t told anyone because I don’t feel there’s anything to tell. It isn’t something I have ever found shame in. It isn’t something I’ve actively hid from anyone, and so I feel no pressure to announce it. The moments have escaped me without action – dramatic pauses between arguments with my parents and quiet instances in conversations with friends. Missed opportunities I never consider because it doesn’t matter anyways. I’m not dating a girl and I haven’t ever. Saying something would be as pointless as learning to swim in a desert. When I say those two simple words of agreement at that moment, they aren’t pointless at all.

The words are an admission to the weight of my stares and lingering touches. They’re a concession to the veil of disinterest I wear in front of everyone else, a recognition of what she has probably correctly assumed.

She stops walking and looks at me, a wry smile crawling up through the corners of her face. I know, says the upward twist of her lips. It seems then that she’s told me for a reason. Her smile acknowledges something I know we’re both feeling but haven’t yet named.

I feel my face flush. If she can see it, she says nothing. I wonder if everyone knows or if it’s only her eyes that can read me like I’m transparent.

In four days, she will be lying down in a bed beside me and make a comment that went something like so this is why you were so excited when I told you I was bi. In three days, she will steal the cigarettes from one of our friends’ jackets. We’ll leave to smoke them on the beach, but end up lying in the sand kissing. In two days, she will hold my hand as we roll through the countryside on a train and tell me she thinks she was meant to meet me. Tomorrow, she’ll kiss me for the first time in a club under a cover of intoxication.

For now, she loops her hand around my arm like a vine of ivy overtaking a building until it rests in my own and leads me through the twisting hills of Seoul. I follow her to wherever it is she’s taking me and feel the invitation through her skin.

This is how it begins.

-Caitlyn Ng Man Chuen

Caitlyn Ng Man Chuen writes with a commitment memory, perception, permanence and the ways in which they diverge. She recently ended a two-and-a-half year love affair with the city of Seoul.