In 2025, I had a brief but tumultuous summer fling with another woman. After a lifetime of late nights lying very still and feeling this growing thing inside of me, building like a tidal wave, I had come only to the conclusion that my red-hot feelings existed, but not that they could ever materialize into something real, capable of crashing down and washing over me. I spent thirteen-year-old Sunday mornings being told what you want is not natural and thirteen-year-old Sunday afternoons washing my hands. Come the beginning of adulthood, the only other women I knew who professed to loving women meant making out at house parties at best, or more likely, swiping right on a dating app never to exchange a word. I was not even this lucky. I chewed on the things I desired by reading poetry and watching bad TV. I tried to swallow them without choking. At best, I spit them out.

I am not a man and cannot pretend to understand the exact shades of their longing or their shame. I can only imagine that where I have felt these things, they often experience them tenfold: perhaps there are contact sports and fistfights, but there is no making-out-at-a-house-party where a man can try on another man's lust for the night and then giggle it off, hungover. There is no clean outlet. One has to stomp out the shame for all to hear or carry it forever, letting it burrow in their naked and terrified heart.

However, after reading Giovanni's Room, I wonder if our experiences are really so dissimilar. Seven months after the end of my two-month love affair, I am coming to accept a truth I thought I was somehow above, despite my fallible humanity: where there are feelings, there is no such thing as a clean outlet. Not even for two grown women, not even with steady voices and the right smiles, the right waves. It started when we made out at a house party. It was almost an accident, but I could not look her in the eye and feign ignorance. I could not look anyone in the eye, remembering her, and feign it now. There are a few memories like this, scattered all over our city: laughing at the bar, cider-drunk, until everyone around us has gone home and we haven't even noticed. Stealing a kiss in a stranger’s kitchen, or in a friend's empty bedroom, or in the bathroom stall, oblivious to the lineup behind us. But more than anything, I remember us soft and silent, letting hours stretch into days and then forever, in her room.

She lived in a clean, warm apartment by herself, a welcome reprieve from the housefly-ridden house I roomed in with three others. It was near downtown in the city I'd lived in my whole life—a quick walk to the park or the mall, the cafe or the ice cream shop—but somehow tucked away in a dreamy suburb where people walked their dogs and let their children play free, as though the outside world didn't know how to touch them here. The streets were named for faraway places like Berlin and Dublin. Somehow, I had never walked any of them until that summer. I would take the bus to see her one night, and then I would blink and it would be morning days later. A five-minute conversation easily sweat into hours. Despite barely knowing her yet, I could say anything and she would understand instantly with frightening precision. At first, I feared I was too wild for her, but now I know that we were built with the exact same crack running through us. When I kissed her I felt every conception I had about the world blowing up like a balloon and bursting; I felt I was a genius and had discovered something no one else had yet figured out. It was beautiful and hurtling toward disaster. I wanted to live in her world forever. I knew almost instantly that if I let it go any longer, we would kill each other, and I had to get out of that room.

So I was recovering from another heartbreak at the time, and the waters were muddy. So we never gave it a name. So it was brief, and we made no promises, and some days we still see each other in the streets. We live in the same city. We smile the right smiles, and wave the right waves. Our story is not Giovanni and David's; I am not a foreigner making my way through a new land, she is not a killer on her way to the guillotine. But in any case, I know that I, too, would have to defend her. It's already happened. I can't take it back. I know her heart.

So today I love someone else, and I don't know why she stills weighs on me. Sometimes I think, if I got on that bus again, and walked into that room, I would understand everything. There is an unimaginable, glowing secret locked behind that door: maybe hidden behind fridge magnet photos, or in the bottle of sleeping pills beside the bed. Some days I want to call her and ask to come over, so I can tear everything apart and find it there. Maybe it was in plain sight all along. Maybe that was where the pit in my stomach came from, looking at my body in her bathroom mirror, naked except the t-shirt she let me wear. I saw it every time I laid on that couch and watched time dissolve into running water at my feet. I heard it over and over again, in the gnawing voice in my head: telling me you have to get out of this room.

"Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought, it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.”