The vision doesn’t come often.
Not nowadays.
Once it was when you asked me whether I was a lesbian, and I decided to laugh it off. The other time was somewhere between awake and asleep, when I was fast drowning into the world where my reality was as pretty as my fantasy.
***
“I didn’t use to be this stupid,” I had laughingly told X, “Do you remember? School used to be so easy for me.”
My voice was hoarse, because of the laugh, and the tears that came right after.
“You aren’t becoming stupid,” X consoled me. It was a hot day; we were at her bedroom watching TV. And drinking something I can’t recall. Probably iced tea, because she loved iced tea so much. “You,” she continued, “you just have too many things on your mind.”
Nevertheless, my grades weren’t as good as they used to be, and if you knew me, you’d understand why this kind of things bothered me. X was of course one the few people that really knew me. She knew me so well that when we were 12 years old, she already predicted what I would do for a living. I also knew her well: I too predicted what she would become when she grew up. Turns out that we both were right. That is, I’m telling you, how well we knew each other.
In my jealous mind, she grew more and more intelligent: she went to the best university in the country, while I grew stupider by the hour and ended up in a university nowhere near her league. My heart was getting heavier when the first semester’s result was out: it was so bad, I even got one ‘D’. Me, I don’t flunk my exams. I simply don’t.
I told her that, for about a gazillion times. (I didn’t use to be this stupid. Look how stupid I am now. I didn’t use to be this stupid. Look how stupid I am now. I didn’t –)
What prompted her to hold me tightly against her heart, I’m not quite sure of. Maybe because I looked so wretched, so nearing nervous breakdown, and she hated seeing me that way. Maybe because she knew it wasn’t about bad grades after all, for it was really about that “too many things in my mind.” Maybe because girls simply hug each other in troubled times.
Whether girls simply kiss each other in troubled times, I don’t know. Yet X and I did.
At that time I had a very innocent relationship with a guy, and when he kissed me, it wasn’t nearly quite like how X kissed me.
Hers were soft kisses that grew fiery by the minute. I had my doubts when her soft lips first touched mine, but when it happened for the second time, I didn’t want anything other than giving in to her sugary mouth. I kissed her back, searching for the soul inside her. Soon she parted her lips, and I hungrily searched deeper for her soul. I realised that day that the velvety tongue that was caressing mine might as well be where her soul resided.
But I didn’t stop there.
We didn’t stop there.
She kissed my neck, and my breasts, and I was overwhelmed by the idea that her soul was maybe in that beating heart of hers. I couldn’t stop kissing her left chest, feeling the centre of her existence banging against the walls of her chest. I was pained with the need to caress her skin. I knew she was too. We both lay skin to skin in each other’s arms, trembling and trying to ease that pain. I had felt the urge to plant my lips all over her body. I kissed her breasts and yes: I kissed, licked, and sucked her tender nipples.
But a lesbian I was not. I am not. And, who are you to say otherwise?
***
The vision doesn’t come often.
Not nowadays.
Once it was when you asked me whether I was a lesbian, and I decided to laugh it off. The other time was somewhere between awake and asleep, when I was fast drowning into the world where my reality was as pretty as my fantasy.
I have no idea whether the vision comes from a dream, or a reality.
It’s not important anyway. All I’m sure of is that I know how it feels to sleep with a girl, as precisely as I know how to make a girl realise the magnificence of being loved by another girl.
