On the weekend, Andy and I slow-danced in my kitchen. We read our books on my sunny balcony, surrounded by kangaroo paws bobbing in the breeze. She taught me to play guitar. And she loved me. Loved me with her eyes radiating joy as I babbled excitedly about a new mentor, loved me by sleepily enfolding my body in hers in the early hours, loved me with her fingers stroking my knee absentmindedly through torn jeans. Loved me in a whole and steady way.

On Monday morning, a student in my classroom shared her Catholic values about the queer community. In her eyes, our love is a moral evil. Her declaration hit hard and froze in my chest. I was the teacher and she the student, but a part of me suddenly shrank small. The next minutes were slow and heavy, every eye of every student on me and my rainbow lapel pin. Take care, I thought, don't... Don't what? Reveal how painful her words are to me? Don't confront too directly this belief that any which way I try to stretch it seems cruel? Don't... be gay?

My student could not know her words were nothing new, rather a repeat of the Christian communities I grew up in. An abomination, the Bible said. Love the sinner, hate the sin, my best friend said. I just want your life to be easy, Mum said. I can still see the post-box through the windscreen of my stalled car on the ordinary day I quietly resolved, Well, I guess I should choose men, and set off down the straight and narrow road for a long stretch of empty years. By then, the choice was abstract anyway.

Though I'd been falling for women since I was twelve, I did not recognise what I felt as desire. Society had decided it was immoral to show women loving women, so wanting a woman was only ever shown to me through a male gaze: boobs in a skimpy red bikini on a size six body, skin shining like plastic and her face a blank canvas. It resembled nothing of how I felt about women. There was no rom-com movie, no episode of Friends, or Dawson's Creek or The OC, that showed that feeling—when a woman talks and is smart, articulate and funny, and all the gravity in the room piles on top of you and the floor opens up and you want to puddle around

her and hope she never stops talking. I did not see on screen the longing to reach out and touch a woman, not because she is a certain shape or size, but because she is her. No one showed the yearning I felt to reach out and ease things for another woman—cup her calf, her hip, her breast—to hold her, because she is beautiful and life is hard. There was nothing in the books in my school library about the desire to have a woman run her fingers through my hair, pull me close, draw my face near to hers so I can see I am known by her. These yearnings were not shown, were not named, and instead stormed inside me, seething and secret, because society

had decided this kind of love was evil.

I did not tell my student this, because I was taking care—of her or me, I couldn't tell. I did go home and cry with Andy. She held me and cupped my hip and drew my face to hers so I could see that I am known by her. Later, when we walked down the street hand in hand, people smiled at us and I was reminded that the world is changing, has changed, since those adolescent days when I needed the language that nobody was stocking my library with. When we got

home, I pulled out a pen to write a contribution so we can all know how women love women.

 

 

 

© Caitlin Prince

 

 

This story was first published in Ourselves: 100 Micro Memoirs by Night Parrot Press (2024).

 

 

Caitlin Prince started writing in a palm-sized notebook when she was seven years old. She hasn't stopped. Her work has appeared in various Australian and international publications—you can google it. Right now, she lives on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja but has a penchant for moving, so google that too.

 

 

www.nightparrotpress.com