She promised me the good wine. The bottle her boss gave her as a reward for staying late on a Friday. But when we arrived at her Brooklyn apartment, she instead grabbed an open bottle of white in her fridge. I didn’t care. My vulva was pulsing like a heartbeat.

While she poured me a glass, I asked if I could use her bathroom. In the mirror, I considered reapplying my faded red lipstick. Would it end up on her neck or, more likely, smeared across my pillowcase? A sign of drunken failure in the morning. I decided against it.

Earlier that evening, when we left the bar to go back to her place, a man walked up to me on the sidewalk and said, “You look like Marilyn Monroe.” I hated how happy I felt that she had witnessed that. Even among two women, the male gaze still mattered somehow.

“You don’t look like Marilyn Monroe, but you are beautiful,” she said.

Before leaving her bathroom, I wiped the specks of mascara under my eyes with toilet paper and reflexively searched for the trash can. There it was: filled with used cotton balls that had rubbed away makeup after a day of work or tampons wrapped carefully in fear that someone would see it. Men never had trash cans in their bathrooms.

She was waiting for me in her bedroom. The air was wet and warm. It was June, and the open window barely made a difference. At the bar, she mentioned that she bought an air conditioner but hadn't installed it yet. The music had pounded out of the speakers as we nervously clutched our perspiring glasses of beer. She said her roommate's dad would help her the next time he visited. I offered my services because I wanted to fill that role for her. Someone who helped keep her comfortable. This is part of the fantasy. The hope that you’ll be around long enough afterward to matter.

Part of me believed this moment would pull me over. Officially embrace my queer identity. Without meaning to, I made her a number, quickly calculating how I had now hooked up with an equal number of men and women. It was as if I was determined to be split in two, and with this number balanced, I could live here on the precipice.

Of course, we both knew it wasn’t that simple.

***

I met my partner, Nick, when we were both in college. We were an all-consuming, give-you-all-my-time, be-with-me-forever, kind of love. The kind that only happens when you’re 18. I’ll be the first to admit that it started out unhealthy; two people desperate for comfort will do that to a relationship. With therapy and time, we learned the careful balance of independence and dependence. A partnership forged out of deep respect for each other and a desire to conquer our demons side-by-side.

But of course, like any young lovers, we came together before we had really begun to understand ourselves as individuals. At 20 we moved into a converted garage our friend rented out to us in Phoenix, Arizona. The walls didn’t match up with the floors. Cockroaches ran in and out as they pleased. Every night, we’d fall asleep to the sound of feral cats’ rampant sex lives.

I don’t remember when it started. Maybe with the cute, female yoga instructor at the free community classes every Sunday. Or earlier, with that girl with the wire-framed glasses checking out a book at my high school library. Or perhaps it was kissing my best friend Madison when we were 14? Probably earlier than that, with Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, when I was seven. But also with Orlando Bloom and his tiny mustache and goatee. Whatever the first warning signs were, it had slowly become self-evident that my sexuality wasn’t as understood as I thought.

Three things seemed clear to me. First, I was attracted to women. Second, there was a part of me—I didn’t know how big—that was queer. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with a man.

Nick was the kind of attractive that you didn’t question: six foot tall with dark chestnut hair and hazel eyes. He could grow a damn good beard and had a deep voice that gave you goosebumps. A man once came up to me while Nick was in the bathroom to give me his phone number—so I could text him later with a photo of Nick’s naked ass. Of course, Nick never noticed this kind of attention. It was this quiet humbleness and gentle spirit that drew me to him.

It happened one Saturday in our junior year of college. It might have been the alcohol or that I was tired of crying on the way home from yoga every week. But either way, I decided it was time to ruin a perfectly good romance. After an afternoon of drinking beer with our friends, Nick and I collapsed into our bed together. It was a 120-degree day, and we removed each sticky item of clothing. (Unbuttoning while intoxicated felt like an Olympic sport.) When sex came to a crescendo, I snuggled into the crook of his arm and listened to our breathing get slower and slower until I wasn’t sure if he was awake.

The white sheets laid delicately across my naked, post-coital body, which provided the delusion that I was Julia Roberts in every rom-com.

“I think I’m gay,” I said.

“What?” Nick said groggily.

I sat up and looked at him. It became hard to breathe.

“But we can still be roommates! I mean, if you want. And- and-” I was cut off by my tears. The over-rehearsed speech came apart quickly.

“Woah! Come here,” he said.

He pulled me back into his chest.

“Do you enjoy having sex with me?”

“What? Yeah, of course.”

“And you’re attracted to me?”

“Yes, but you’re not listening to me. I’m attracted to women. I’ve known for a while now. I just thought it would go away on its own.”

Nick smiled at me with his stupidly beautiful face.

“Is there a chance– Now hear me out! Is there a chance, that you’re bisexual?”

I sat up and curled my arms around my shins. Bisexual, I rolled the word around in my mouth. The only bisexual person I knew was sent to a “Pray the Gay Away” camp in Texas. My mom said that bisexuals were just confused, gay people. I rocked back and forth in this egg-like pose while Nick waited patiently.

Bisexual, huh.

After weeks of googling (and a lot of Buzzfeed quizzes), I still had my doubts. How was I supposed to know if I really was bisexual? Meanwhile, Nick encouraged me to explore sexual experiences outside of our relationship. Queer nightlife was practically non-existent in Phoenix, so it wasn't until we graduated and moved to New York City that I started to consider his proposal. Eventually, I gave in to a pretty woman I met at Stonewall, a historic gay bar in Greenwich Village. We didn’t exchange names or need to say anything at all. She was significantly shorter than me, with long box braids and a confident smile that encouraged me to follow her to the couches in the back room.

The next day, Nick and I grabbed lunch at our favorite local deli.The weather was hot enough that it wasn’t hard to find a seat outside the cafe. He asked me how I felt after my first time hooking up with a woman. I closed my eyes and scanned my body for changes. I didn’t feel different, just hungry. I bit into my sandwich and shrugged.

I didn’t think of it at the time but later I would learn about The Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment that questions the nature of identity. If an object has all of its original components replaced, does the object become something different entirely?

“For they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber

in their places…one side of [philosophers] holding that the ship remained the same, and

the other contending that it was not the same.” - Plutarch, Theseus

I wondered, could enough queer experiences change who I am? Or, at least prove that I was not the person I thought I was when I lived in the binary world of straight or gay.

As time went on, the dance floor at gay bars became my weekly hangout. There, eye contact led to making out on sticky, pleather couches or finger fucking in the bathroom. On the flip side, my relationship was thriving because I could finally be my true self. It felt like this arrangement would work: I could stay in a relationship with Nick while hooking up with strangers.

That is until I met her.

She was different. She wasn’t someone I met at a bar, but a friend of a friend who had a passion for dance and books and spooky things and tried to guess my horoscope sign based on my preference for wine. She was the first woman I had a crush on without simultaneously crushing that feeling.

Though I knew her name, I didn’t describe her in my journal. At least, not explicitly. Her name felt sacred because it was the first time I had bothered to find out. This was distressingly concrete and could no longer be just a blurred memory under bar lights.

Somewhere in-between her squeezing my thigh at a birthday party, and DMing her on Instagram, I gave in to my feelings for her. I threw in an exclamation point after, “I’m excited to see you tonight!” in the hopes it would translate into, “I’m really into you! In a very gay way!”

As I headed out to meet her at the bar Friends & Lovers, I hesitated in the doorway of our apartment.

“Maybe I should stay home,” I said.

Nick sat on our couch perched in front of his laptop for a cozy night-in.

What was I thinking? Why would I want to leave this behind?

Often there is the myth of dichotomy in bisexuality, giving the illusion that it means half-gay and half-straight. Raised Catholic, my sexuality felt like purgatory—being caught in limbo waiting for someone else to decide my fate.

“Go,” he said. “You’ll have a good time.”

Half-convinced, I pushed myself out the door.

***

As I walked into her bedroom, I noticed her hair straightener lying cold on the floor by a mirror.   

“Did you do your hair for me?” I asked.

I hoped to sound playful and flirty, but I wanted a serious answer. Did she want to impress me? I liked the idea of her standing in front of her closet, debating what to wear for the night. I wanted her to overthink it. I had tried on ten different outfits before meeting her.

She smirked, then let her hand brush against mine when she gave me the wine glass. My skin started to crackle. There were no chairs in her bedroom, so I sat at the edge of her bed. We talked about family and friends and love and dreams. I couldn’t get enough of her. Each time she smiled at me, I found myself wiggling closer. I looked into her icy blue eyes and took in the black hair that framed her face. One more sip of wine gave me the courage to kiss her. My hands moved to unbutton her jeans, and we laughed while we struggled to pull the tight fabric down her legs. When I saw her thighs, I wanted to grab chunks like cake and shove them into my mouth.

There’s a scene in Desiree Akhavan’s show The Bisexual where her character leaves a ten-year relationship with a woman and has sex with a man for the first time in her life. After they finish, she starts laughing hysterically. “It’s the same! Sex is exactly the same,” she said, exasperated. It's the same longing and tension and pulling and grabbing and wanting and giving and taking. Again, I thought of The Ship of Theseus. I hadn’t given myself permission to consider both could exist at once: changed but the same. Isn't the butterfly formed from a caterpillar and also something altogether new?

That night, she kissed my forehead after we fucked. It made me feel loved even though I knew she didn’t love me. Or perhaps she did love me in that way where you can deeply care for someone you barely know—the silhouette of the person before you fill in the details. Maybe she could see the hazy outline that would eventually form my sense of self.

I thought what I was looking for was simply validation that I was bisexual. While sexuality is more than the act of sex itself, following my desires led me to understand what I was truly craving—to feel whole. First, I needed to pull myself apart—plank by plank—and examine the decayed ideas of what it looked like for me to love. It was there, under the skin of gender, where I found that my queerness was omnipresent. That my identity was never about her or Nick or the genders they represented. My bisexuality threaded through each sinewy tissue and pulled taught through my bones—no longer split in two but finally sewed together.

We kissed one more time in her doorway with my dress inside out and her in an oversized t-shirt. While I waited for a cab on the stoop of her building, I watched the Brooklyn neighborhood at four in the morning. I watched the world pay no attention to me, knowing I am not the same and completely the same.

-Melanie Whyte

Melanie Whyte is a queer writer based in NYC. Her work has been published/featured in NPR News Morning Edition, Forge Literary Magazine, Real Simple and Refinery29, among other publications. You can find more personal details on her social media (@melaniejwhyte).