A few minutes after showing up I excused myself to the bathroom, which was crowded with women talking about girlfriend drama. In my absence a woman at the bar struck up a conversation with my friend by saying something along the lines of “Is she not treating you right?”
After I returned, as I waited for my friend to wrap up what seemed a random friendly conversation, I chatted with an Australian tourist, a man I later realized was the only one in sight. It was only once she extricated herself and I mentioned the bathroom gossip that we realized something different was swirling around us. We were in a lesbian bar.
“I could never date a woman,” she said, looking disgusted. She’d often been mistaken as gay despite being entirely boy-obsessed, something she ascribed to her “athletic” build, square-shouldered and lean. “What about you?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, without thinking much about the question.
“You don’t know?” she said, a frown on her face. I could tell she viewed me differently for my answer, though I meant little by it.
“How would I know?” I replied. As a rule, I dislike ruling anything out. Even if I thought of myself as straight, even if the situation was entirely theoretical, “never” seemed so extreme. How could I know such a thing?
I’d had more pressing concerns—the violence swirling around me, the untreated mental and neurodegenerative illnesses of my middle sister and mother, the void left by my father after his departure for Korea. To be honest, I’d often thought of sexual identity politics as a first-world problem.
My philosophy is and has been simple. I love the person first and foremost. The rest doesn’t matter. The idea of love has always seemed a refuge—something precious, untainted. It is that simple, and it isn’t.
* * *
When I think back to my ex-girlfriend’s and my beginnings, I see the damage that can occur when you don’t admit to desire. It was only later, after we broke up, that I had emotional space of my own, to think through what our relationship had meant to me. How it had challenged my ideas of love, and of my identity.
It began just as I was preparing to leave the city for grad school in rural Indiana. I’d decided to pursue writing against the advice of nearly everyone I knew. Doing so felt less choice than recognition: my life circumstances had long ago set me apart from my peers, even if we shared the privilege of a good education.
I’d grown up in silence and shame around the strange circumstances of my family life, and I couldn’t reconcile it anymore. I wanted to escape the critical voices around me, who were too practical to assign worth to writing or an MFA. I wanted to escape the money-driven nature of the city. I wanted time and psychic space, to think and work.
She was a voice of support. As an artist who’d applied to MFAs multiple times, she understood their allure. We were both restless for something new. She wanted a fresh intellectual challenge. She wanted to stand on her own as a climber, separate from her father’s shadow. She saw me first in that light: as a climber.
She’d already left for Los Angeles by the time I set forth. We surprised ourselves with the discovery of each other.
* * *
On her thirtieth birthday, she and I spent the evening outside. We’d nestled our campsite between a river and a beautiful cliff band. We hoped to climb the next day. Rain drizzled on us, but still, we hung out by the fire, ate heat-lamp roast chicken and avocado slices with our fingers. I chilled a bottle of sparkling wine in the river, and we toasted out of matching Sesame Street cups.
We’d jammed a queen-size air mattress into her orange tent, and we crawled in to wait out the weather. That night, sounds of rain drummed down on us endlessly, but when we woke, snow greeted us. White glitter had frosted the tent, the trees, the crag, the vista. It meant we couldn’t climb, but we didn’t care. We went to natural hot springs and sat steaming, instead, as the cold air bit our faces. It was April in Wyoming. We were just friends then.
* * *
On my thirtieth birthday, she and I searched fruitlessly, at the wrong dirt turnout, for natural hot springs in small-town Utah. That night I saw my first shooting star. A birthday gift from the universe, she said. A few days later, we stumbled upon a lamb-eating festival, in a tiny town that once communally owned a hundred thousand head of sheep. The locals recognized us after the first day. They chatted with us kindly, laughed when we mispronounced the names of nearby Mormon-settled towns, helped us understand important details of the lamb-sandwich ordering system, justified the number of lambs they’d decided to roast in the pit that year.
She and I laughed privately, in turn, at the men who wore pink-and-white-striped aprons and drank Mountain Dew rather than beer as they barbequed. We marveled at the lamb auctioneer and gorged on sourdough fry-bread. We stroked lush sheepskins. We climbed hard each day of the festival, listening to Jeff Buckley as we drove into the crags, and then stuffed ourselves full of lamb to recover. It was July in Mormon country. We weren’t lovers yet.
* * *
We spent the summer together, endlessly extending our trip. We meant to write a collaborative proposal for an artist residency, for the following summer—we even sat on tractor tires together under the moon, in a random playground in a random town, taking notes on each other’s ideas.
In moments when we weren’t working, climbing, or making things, we talked about life and love, writing and art and music, usually in front of a campfire, stars as the backdrop. This was remarkable, to me and to her—that we could share all these things. That hadn’t been either of our experience in the past—the totality of the experience, as she put it.
The man I’d spent the past decade with and I had decided to part. We’d tested it once before. This time, we both knew the break was final. She had known he and I were on the rocks, and she gave me love advice. You should be with an artist, she told me. It’s how your mind works.
Given she was one, I took her advice seriously.
She’d been with the same man for eight years. At times she seemed frustrated with his lack of interest in ideas, his fear of adventure, but those moments faded quickly. I’m basically married, she’d told me cheerfully on a few occasions. Just as she told me frequently, somewhat randomly and seemingly unprompted, I’m straight.
* * *
On a rest day, we sat on rocks in a dry streambed, as she made field recordings and sketches, and I jotted down notes for an essay. On a climb day, after we warmed up, she belayed me on a hundred-foot climb, 5.12c, severely overhanging. The rock was conglomerate; misshapen bowling balls and other slippery protrusions stuck out. The route required nearly twenty quickdraws that jangled against each other as I climbed. When she lowered me, I landed twenty or twenty-five feet away from her, due to the angle. The climb was above her pay grade, as she put it, and so I belayed her on a different line. She made a field recording while I climbed, which she later incorporated into a track.
The day seemed representative of our passions. I’d been climbing for twelve years—it had been a fount of happiness, my first love. I’d loved sports and wilderness since I was a child, had weight-lifted as a teen. Athletics had been my escape. I’d lived solo out of a tent, on the road, for months at a time.
She, on the other hand, had grown up in Chicago’s rave scene. Her father had foisted climbing upon her ever since she was a child, but until recently, she hadn’t owned it as central to her own identity. She’d DJed in Chicago, Montreal, New York, LA, made electronic music now. As she said wryly, many of her friends were international techno gods. Unlike her, I knew nothing about the DJ scene, but I’d been classically trained in music, rather against my will. Just as with climbing, we spoke variations of the same language.