The Accidental Kiss

I was eight-years-old when I first realized that I was gay. I may not have known the definition, I may not have even known the word . . . but I knew the feeling. It was the swarm of butterflies that flew into one another deep within my stomach every time I was around her. It was the sweatiness of my palms and nervous vibrations in my voice whenever she was close enough for me to smell the fabric softener in her clothes or the sweet scent of her shampoo. She was my best friend and my first crush.
I was raised in a neighborhood in which there were entirely too many boys and not enough girls for me to play with. This was my mother’s sentiment. For me, I was perfectly happy playing with GI Joe’s instead of Barbie’s, riding my bike pretending it was a motorcycle and running around in the summer time with out my shirt on. I was just like everyone else. I was happy being a girl who was accepted as “one of the guys.”
By the time I reached third grade, I couldn’t imagine myself being any other way. My mother had tried to dress me in skirts and put ribbons in my hair, but I wouldn’t budge. I wanted my hair short and I wanted to wear jeans. I was proud of who I was and never questioned it. I didn’t understand that I was a tomboy because I never saw myself as one. I saw myself as Lyndsey; the only way I knew how to be.

In school, I had friends who were girls though there were times I didn’t understand their way of thinking. Instead, I understood why all the boys in our class thought my best friend was the prettiest girl. I understood because I too thought she was beautiful.
At first I didn’t realize that it was a crush. I couldn’t understand why I wanted to be around her all of the time, why I felt so lucky when she would pull me aside and whisper a secret into my ear, why every time I walked into school I was flying because I knew I was going to see her. I never stopped to wonder if other girls felt this way about her too. Since I considered myself just one of the guys, I thought I was entitled to feel this way.

I entertained thoughts of us holding hands and kissing. I felt a sensation I was unfamiliar with, a tingling quiver between my legs, down there, when I would kiss my own hand pretending that it was hers. I wondered if she felt this way about me. I wanted to find out. Eventually, I did.

I was sitting at my desk after the bell had rang signaling the start of the day. My teacher had given us an assignment and we were to be working on it silently by ourselves. My best friend, who normally sat in the desk right next to me, had not come to school yet and as a result, I was in a state of panic. Where was she? Was she sick, was she hurt? My mind raced with the pace of a tornado, twisting tragedies back and forth past my eyes. I kept glancing over my shoulder to the door. While my classmates were busy completing the assignment, I was busy doodling her name on a scrap piece of paper, my left leg shaking frantically and my heart feeling as thought it might just fly right out of my chest and land on the floor.

I watched the clock; each minute passing only added another drop to the puddle of worry that was growing in my stomach. Then, just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to sit there any longer, the classroom door opened and in she walked. I almost fell out of my chair. She immediately headed into the cloakroom. I looked up at my teacher who was occupied with the papers on her desk. She had warned us to stay in our seats, but this was an emergency. How could I stay in my seat when the most wonderful girl I knew was standing only a few feet away in the cloakroom? I placed my hands cautiously on my desk and stood up while keeping my eyes planted on my teacher. The adrenaline that was pumping through my veins prompted me to make a move or forever be stuck in an uncomfortable half standing position. I swiftly left my seat and snuck to the back of the class to the cloakroom. As soon as I saw her, I wanted to hug her. Her smile nearly knocked me over. She was casually hanging up her coat; to her it was just another day at school. To me it was heaven.

“I missed you,” I told her while fiddling with my hands because I wasn’t sure where to put them. Inching closer to her, I felt the sweat begin to creep along my palms. This was it. I couldn’t hide it anymore. I had to do something. I had to express the feelings that were wrapping themselves around me in a blanket of anticipation. Without thinking, I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. It was courageous. It was incredible. It was … a very big mistake. The smile on my face faded instantly when I saw the look of fear and discomfort behind her eyes.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, almost angrily.

My heart sank. This wasn’t happening the way I had imagined it. I struggled to find an explanation, a reason that would make sense that what I had just done was completely normal. My innocent mind searched for a witty response but all I could come up with was, “I kiss all my friends like that.” She wasn’t convinced.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to crawl into one of the lockers and disappear. I knew that I couldn’t ever kiss her like that again. For some reason it was wrong, very wrong. The thickness of the air between us hung there until I cowered and returned to my seat. For the rest of the day, she avoided me. I began to understand why. Girls don’t kiss other girls that way. Girls don’t like other girls that way. I didn’t know why I had these feelings, but I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have them; they were wrong. I could never, ever act on them again.

Being so young and already feeling so different from other girls was difficult for me. I didn’t want to act girly or be something that I wasn’t but at the same time I didn’t want to have these feelings anymore and not fit in. I just wanted to be normal, like everyone else. The accidental kiss, as I call it, told me that what I had done wasn’t normal, that the best thing to do was forget about those feelings, push them down until they weren’t there anymore. I was only eight and already denying the person I was inside.

Things between her and I were never the same after that. In fact, I don’t even remember our friendship beyond that memory. My family moved shortly after, to a suburb, which was fine by me. All I wanted to do was start over; forget about the mistake I had made, make knew friends who didn’t know me, or the feelings I had for other girls. I could like boys if I tried. It couldn’t be that hard.

I soon found, however, that these particular feelings were not going to just fade away. I began to have dreams about other girls at night, and daydream about girls in my class during the day. I kept them to myself, like they were my own special secret. And that was okay. I would be okay as long as nobody else knew. I went on with my life, dealing with the every day adolescent issues. I was still a tomboy, but I learned how to blend in with everyone else. I learned that it was acceptable for girls to be athletic and play sports. For a while I was content.

High school came and so did the development of sexual urges. Alone in my room at night, I would fantasize about other girls. The feelings inside me had not gone away like I had hoped they would. They had grown stronger. Still, I knew I could never tell anyone about them. In learning about sex from other kids as most of us do, I also learned that being gay was a disgusting and horrible thing. This only justified my wanting to keep my feelings for other girls a secret. In order to satisfy my sexual curiosity, I dated boys. The pressure to fit in during high school is incredibly suffocating. Before I knew it, I had a reputation to up hold. I was one of the top athletes in my school and popular among my classmates. My boyfriend and I were voted home coming king and queen. Me, the quintessential tomboy, voted into an office usually held by lipstick wearing girls who cared about whether their shoes matched their shirt or if their hair looked better pulled back or swaying just below their shoulders. Instead of a gown, I wore jeans and my soccer jersey during the homecoming parade. The irony of it all intrigues me. Here I was doing my best to just fit in and be accepted while denying who I truly was inside. And I was being rewarded for it.

When I flip back to my journal, I often turn to an entry that I made while in eleventh grade. It was after a summer writing camp at Clemson University where I developed a crush on a girl I had met there. I wrote: “I know that I like other girls the same way boys like girls and I don’t think it is ever going to go away. But I can hide it. I think that if anyone ever found out I would just die. So, I just keep it a secret. And I am okay with that.”

I know now that I was never “okay” with that. Deep inside, I was hoping that someone would find out, that something would happen so that I could just pop the cap on the bottled up feelings that had been dwelling inside of me since the third grade, maybe even before then.

But it wasn’t until my junior year of college that the top of the bottle came flying off. I had enrolled in a creative writing class that met once a week on Thursday nights. I distinctly remember the second class, where we were to read our journal entries from the week before out loud. Naturally, I was doodling, letting my mind wander, barely paying attention when her voice slipped into my thoughts. It was soft and captivating. I listened as she described a visit to the beach when she was younger, the way the frigid water curled up over her toes and made her feet go numb. The way she used her words was like honey, sweet and dripping lightly off of her tongue. When she finished, I wanted more.

The next class I couldn’t wait for her to share her work again, and to my pleasant surprise, she sat next to me. She spoke to me, wanted to get to know me and I was stunned. Me? This brilliant, spectacular girl wanted to get to know me? It was exactly like third grade, only this time it was no longer a childish crush, it was an intense infatuation, too intense to be capped up in a bottle.

Sometime during that semester, I lost the hold that I had kept so tightly over my feelings. They became too overpowering to deal with, but because of the fear of being rejected by my friends; I never sought out anyone to talk to. Instead, in my fridge would be bottles of beer or cheap champagne stocked for the sole purpose of easing my nerves before writing class. Each Thursday, I would lock myself in my room and listen to music while drinking. With liquid courage, I would be calm enough to be around her and control the feelings that were overflowing inside of me.

Despite being intoxicated for almost the entire semester, I was able to pass the class successfully. The girl, whose name is as exotic as she is, was well aware of my feelings for her. She played with them, sometimes flirting with me, sometimes ignoring my presence. I was stuck in a web of mystification spun by her desire to do with me whatever she pleased. We never kissed, though I desperately wanted to. At the end of the semester, she had grown bored with me and reunited with her old boyfriend. She stopped talking to me completely. That was when I fell flat on my face with depression. I had never felt for any of my boyfriends the way I had felt about her. She was everything I needed and she had understood my passion for writing. More importantly, she knew the one thing that nobody else knew about me, the one thing I had been denying my entire life; she knew I was gay.

After she ended our friendship, I was convinced that my interactions with her were the closest I would ever come to experiencing homosexuality. I was devastated because I no longer wanted to keep my feelings to myself. I wanted to explore them, I needed to explore them. But I had no way of doing so.

A depression took over me and I lost myself. I relied heavily on alcohol to help me get through the rest of the semester. The last night of my junior year, I drank till I became numb. On my way through the dorms later on in the evening after my buzz had taken control of my conscious, I ran into a girl who had been a good friend of mine during the fall semester that year. Sometime during the year we had drifted apart, and I never questioned why . . . until that very moment.
I decided to lay it all out and ask her what had happened between us, why had she stopped talking to me, was it something I had done. She suggested that we talk in her room and I agreed. Once within her dorm room walls, I exploded, spewing words so fast from my mouth they seemed to be tied to one another at the ends. She tried to get in a word here and a word there, but couldn’t seem to break into my self-absorbed flow. Completely frustrated, she blurted out something that made me stop talking in mid sentence.

“Since the moment we met, I’ve had a crush on you.”

My jaw hit the floor and bounced back up to my face. She proceeded to tell me that the reason she had stopped talking to me was because she didn’t know how to deal with her feelings. I couldn’t believe it! The entire time I had been locked in my room drinking endless bottles of beer and cheap champagne, someone else had been going through the exact same thing. I fell onto her bed and told her everything. We talked for hours, and she understood how I felt. It was so reassuring to know that another living person was dealing with the same confusion that I had been. She made it seem okay, she made me feel normal again.

That night, I finally experienced my first real kiss with another girl. It was everything I had imagined it would be and more. The kiss confirmed to me what I had already suspected; that I was gay. It also told me that it was time for me to fully explore this side of me that I had so carefully denied since the third grade.

After my junior year of college, I felt a change sweep over me, a sense of acceptance for who I was that I hadn’t felt since that day I had kissed my best friend in the cloak room. I spent my entire senior year learning about myself, and taking time to be by myself either by reading, writing or working out in the gym. This prepared me for my move to Boston the next year, where I lived with a childhood friend that I had grown up with throughout middle school and high school.

Once in Boston, the full exploration of my homosexuality became a reality. I met other people who were just like me, dressed liked me, thought like me, and took me to gay clubs and activities. I came out to myself completely and came out to my childhood friend who laughed and simply said, “So what. I still love you.”

One positive reaction after the next only enabled me to become more comfortable with myself. I slowly came out to members of my family, dated my first girlfriend, and pursued interests I had long forgotten. Eventually, I left the closet behind me.

I often think back to the accidental kiss in the cloakroom, how before that moment I was completely happy with who I was and loved myself unconditionally. That one little kiss changed my whole perception and sent me off on a journey of self-discovery and acceptance. Interestingly enough, another little kiss brought me back.

People sometimes ask me how old I was when I first realized that I was gay. "I was eigh- years-old," I tell them. That was when I first realized it. But, it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I finally accepted it. It wasn’t until then that I fully understood how good it felt to just be me.

Story ID:	409
Written by:	Lyndsey Darcangelo (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Story
Location:	Buffalo USA
Year:	2002
Person:	myself