Summer love.

When I was fif­teen, I fell in love with a girl, well, two girls, actu­ally. It was my first hard­core girl on girl crush, my first head over heels expe­ri­ence with the same sex, and my first heart­break. Ah, the bit­ter­sweet tang of puppy love — there’s noth­ing quite like it, is there?

I was spend­ing the sum­mer at an all girls’ uni­ver­sity half a coun­try away from any­one I knew. I was all long legs and bud­ding breasts, and still amused when men were unable to look me in the eye when they spoke to me. I thought I knew all there was to know about boys — I had all the boys at school twisted around my lit­tle fin­ger. But despite all the rumors fly­ing around about my high school room­mate and I (that we were lovers — we weren’t…not yet) I didn’t know a damn thing about girls.

The first crush was much older than me — she was actu­ally one of my instruc­tors. A math major at Har­vard, she was bril­liant, witty, clever and I thought she was gor­geous. I’d never really felt any­thing for another girl, espe­cially not one like her. She was what I would now describe as a butch, short boy­ish hair, ironic t-shirts tucked into the waist of her jeans, slim hips. I was in awe of her, of her worldi­ness, of her intel­lect. I wanted to be her, I wanted to be with her. She was my men­tor in so many things, guid­ing me through the awk­ward stages of ado­les­cence, intro­duc­ing me to a world that I never knew existed, one of lit­er­a­ture, travel, and exploration.

The other girl was closer to me in age, bisex­ual, though I didn’t find that out until later. She was worlds above me in expe­ri­ence, fully aware of her sex­u­al­ity and fully aware of the power she wielded.  Slim with short curly hair, she delighted in toy­ing with her sex­u­al­ity. Lowslung men’s jeans with a ratty t-shirt and sneak­ers one day, a del­i­cate flo­ral sun­dress with sculpted heels the next –she was a mer­cu­r­ial chimera. I was in awe of her, stut­ter­ing and stum­bling over my words when she spoke to me. I remem­ber the clear bell-like trill of her laugh, the feel of her arm against mine. The smell of her skin, and the huskier notes in her voice when she whis­pered in my ear. I wasn’t the only one in love with her — there was anothe girl, much closer to her. They’d grown up together, were from the same home­town, and any­one who saw them could see the devo­tion of the other girl. She was like a faith­ful puppy fol­low­ing her mas­ter to the ends of the earth.

It never went any fur­ther than that, not for me, not that sum­mer. I was too shy to do any­thing more than flirt. I was all talk, hot air and bravado — my insides quiv­er­ing at the feel of her arm around me. The older one went on to grad­u­ate from Har­vard — she and I remained in con­tact for years, a men­tor to my naivete, and she became a good friend, guid­ing me through a com­pli­cated affair. The other girl broke my heart, though not nearly as badly as she broke her friend’s heart. I wasn’t the one who found out about the older Navy boyfriend who took her vir­gin­ity on the eighth green of a local golf course. I wasn’t the one who had also fooled around with her on the same golf course, wasn’t the one who was com­pletely dev­as­tated, and wasn’t the one who went home early that summer.

I went home that sum­mer changed, a lit­tle older and a lit­tle wiser. I’d learned some­thing about myself and some­thing about the nature of love and rela­tion­ships, and that it didn’t mat­ter who you fell in love with, whether they were a girl or a boy, that the heart­break was still the same, the heartache just as bit­ter, and the rewards just as sweet.