How to be an Ethereal Bisexual

1. Begin with kissing practice. In middle school, stay up late with a girl from your orchestra class and try out your lips on one another’s skin—not on the mouth, but on the inside of elbows and tender spots of stomachs. First take hesitant pecks, then slurps of spit and lips, then laps of tongue. Neither of you has been kissed yet, and it feels desperately important that you learn. Feel funny and need to pee frequently, and in the bathroom, moisture coats your underwear.

2. Plan for your first boyfriend freshman year. Align yourself with the band crowd—the flautists who sleep with the trumpets, the virgins on oboe, a lesbian named Jane who sits in the back and bangs on the drums. Your first boyfriend plays tenor sax, you alto. Hold hands for a month, then decide it is time you kiss. Bump your teeth on his, and afterwards shiver and feel slightly sick. It was never more than a trial run, and when you break up with him, it is almost as exciting of a “first” as the kiss and the relationship have been.

3. Pick your next boyfriend carefully. Make sure he’s a junior and has a car. Start lying to your mother and going to your boyfriends after school, where he rubs on top of you until your zipper makes you come. Sometimes he pulls down your pants and puts his hand inside of you. This feels good, but not as good as the zipper. Don’t sleep with him. He wants to, but don’t do it. When friends start to have sex, they tell you it hurts, but look flushed and important when they say it. Your junior boyfriend breaks up with you. Why didn’t you just do it? friends ask. Wonder why you aren’t like other girls. This is not the last time you wonder this.

4. Befriend the lesbian named Jane. The two of you spend hours lying in the band room talking about politics and books and what you want to be when you grow up. You want to be a marine biologist or the principal upright bassist in the London Philharmonic. Jane wants to be a rock star or a firefighter or the first woman president. It’s 2008 and Obama has just been elected and Jane is the only one “out” at your school. You feel unformed and on the cusp of self-discovery, like loose dice ready to be cast, and you admire the certainty with which Jane presents herself. There are rules for how to be gay, she tells you, rules she’s memorized and inhabited, like what to wear or watch or which sports to play, even who to date. Who to date? you ask. No straight girls, she says, and when you ask if that includes bisexuals, Jane says that’s not a thing.

By junior year, cliques have contracted, reassembled, set. You’re a solid band nerd and you don’t mind this casting. Drive around in Jane’s car listening to Sleater Kinney and playing Hey Mister. Read Anaïs Nin at lunch and dream of college. But by senior year, feel deeply ashamed of your virginity. Worry that you are behind your peers in the acquisition of something important. Realize that you were wrong to turn down your junior boyfriend; that no boy wants you and you will likely die a virgin. To complicate matters, you are always turned on. Masturbate furiously wherever you can find privacy. Most girls have lost it by now, you moan to Jane. Most girls aren’t half as cool as you, she says back. Laugh. Don’t believe her.

5. Make sure you kiss at least one girl in high school. This kiss will be important later when you spend years trying to pinpoint the first moment of queerness. It happens at a party, the house dense with weed and cigarette smoke. Drink three cans of Busch Light. Take one hit. The kiss is a dare and boys whistle and cheer in the fog. But when you touch her lips, think they are so soft. Think of Jane.

6. Graduate. Sign some yearbooks and throw your cap at the conferring of degrees. Secretly mourn that you never had sex in high school. Then pack your suitcase for college three months early and spend the summer lakeside with Jane. Get a job wiping down menus and walking old people to their booths. One of the dishwashers, a boy a few years older, brings you fries. Start to sit with him on the steps by the trash and talk about music. He wants to be a DJ, he tells you. You’re really smart, he tells you. He takes you to an all-ages club, which is just an after-hours Mexican restaurant with the tables pushed to the walls. On the pounding dance floor, kiss him.

He is who you have been waiting for, but as soon as you have him, delay action. One night, the boy who wants to be a DJ asks to try something. You think he means penetration, but instead he pulls down your underwear and puts his lips on you. It is the best thing you have ever felt. Before August ends, consummate your relationship in the way you were always told it matters. Your arms tingle when he goes all the way inside, but it doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it would. Mostly it feels like movement, and slight discomfort. Break up because you are moving out of state.

Step 7 is very important. It is best accomplished if, at eighteen, you move across the country to attend an all-women’s college (note: not the religious kind). Join ultimate frisbee. At the first practice meet the star, a senior, who has a low ponytail and a sideways grin. The team orbits around her, and with them she is illustrious and terrifying, talking about bagging girls and shooting beer. They all party in her dorm, and you are a nobody, but she asks if you’re coming. There you drink, and she ignores you until she is very drunk when she stumbles up and says, you’re really pretty. The next morning, she drives you to buy a pitch pipe. What are you studying? she asks, and when you say music, she looks at you too quickly. Email songs back and forth all day and listen to them on your computer in bed. The last one she sends is a music video of a woman hula hooping. The singer repeats I think I like you and you sit straight up in bed.

That night is black and full of frogs. The Massachusetts air smells wet and warm when you walk across campus to her dorm. Afterwards, nothing in your life is ever the same.

8. In the senior’s bed, learn terms like soft butch and hard femme; that Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Michelle Rodriguez are lesbian icons; that The L Word is trash, but you must watch all of it anyway in order to be gay. What if I’m bi? You ask, but the senior scoffs. There’s nothing worse than a LUG, she says, a Lesbian Until Graduation. The senior drinks constantly and at night tells you her sad broken stories until you feel your heart wrap itself around her. You are so obsessed with her that when you are apart you feel physically ill. When you find out that she is also sleeping with a sophomore and another senior and her ex-girlfriend, you want to take a razor to every memory of her.

9. Implode. The senior leaves you rudderless, unsure of what you are. Try to find out by cutting your hair, and by dressing like a boy, and by fucking your way through the rest of freshman year. Leave for summer break hating every second of yourself.

10. Pick a very popular television show, one whose male lead is very handsome and sad, and fall in love with him. Ignore Jane when she texts, are you back? Can we talk? Watch your show all summer so that by the end you have rid yourself of anything queer.

11. Start sophomore year determined to meet a man. Vow to go off-campus and get on OkCupid. Meet the girl in the backwards cap instead. She plays golf and is effortlessly cool and her ponytail makes your insides ache. Everybody wants her, but for some reason she wants you, even though you have bangs and corduroy overalls and spend an entire date gushing about your Topics in Musical History class. Even though you tell her, I’m not gay. All my girlfriends have been straight, she says. Be unsure what this says about you.

For the girl in the backwards cap, come out to your parents. Post pictures of the two of you to your Facebook and don’t even care that everyone from back home will see. Your old orchestra friend likes one. So does Jane. That fall, the girl in the backwards cap is your first I love you, and that is the most thrilling first of all.

12. Let her leave you. In December the girl in the backwards cap entrusts you with a secret. The secret is that she is a man, and in January he begins his transition. Help him cut his hair. Practice pronouns and agree to a strap on. Watch him test out his masculinity like trying on a suit, turning around and eyeing himself to see if it's a good fit. But it isn’t, not yet, and he is angry. He tries other things, like the douche-bag jar that he fills with money or the parties he takes you to where tiny, dolled-up girls hang off men in polo shirts.

Change to keep him. Grow your bangs out. Lose the overalls. Straighten your hair and slather makeup on your face. In the end, the boy in the backwards cap leaves you for the most beautiful girl you have ever seen, and you wonder if your failure to be a straight woman is why you couldn’t make him feel like a man.

13. For a while, stop eating. Run constantly. Drop so much weight your mother says she’s worried. During this time mount a boy in a lake but be unable to get wet. Lie drunk under a girl and cry partway through. In the fall, travel to Rome to study music. At the Trevi Fountain, wish to be normal.

14. Return to school. It’s 2013 and Obama is about to start his second term and you are finally 21. Buy booze and drink before class, and at your campus job, and in the music room alone where you can’t find the will to play. Force yourself to rise and go to class until one day you can’t. Stay in bed all day, and the next do it again. A week goes by, then another. Don’t answer when your mother calls or your professors’ email. And then she tags you in a post. It’s a photo from high school, your arm around Jane. The two of you are laughing. My ride or die, the caption reads. Call your mother. Tell her you need help.

15. Make an appointment with the school psychiatrist. For the first time, talk about the confusion and questions pounding in your head. Tell her you must be straight, because the boy in the backwards cap is a man. Tell her you loved him when you thought he wasn’t. The psychiatrist prescribes you 100mg of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Take it and feel exactly the same except one day it’s not as hard to get out of bed. In May your mother says you seem better. Friends say you seem like yourself. When you run into him outside the student union with his beautiful girlfriend, the boy in the backwards cap says that you are glowing. Laugh. Almost believe him.

16. At graduation, saber a bottle of champagne. Then pack your car and drive with a friend to the city. Fill a tiny apartment with things from Goodwill and the Salvation Army. A degree in music doesn’t go far, so get a job waiting tables. Watch the tips slip away on parking tickets, cheap beer, rent. In your apartment, burn your knees straddling a boy on a rug. Sleep with a second. When he doesn’t come from sex, sit beside him while he grabs himself. Before sex with a third, tell him you think you’re bi. He asks if that means you’re still deciding, and for weeks after, wonder if it does.

17. Swipe left. Right. Left left left. Right. He is tall and a runner and makes real money doing people’s taxes. You like to kiss him, something you do in his car and on your used mattress with his erection in your hip. One night, drinks go late at a friend’s. Stay over, you on the couch and the runner on the floor. In the dark, reach for his hand. He comes up onto the couch and kisses you like stretching taffy. The two of you seem to be talking, but not through words. Take off your shorts. Take off his. You are wetter than you have ever been, and when he finds you, feel a deep, slick, burning pleasure. Afterwards, wonder why it took so long for it to feel that way.

18. Date the runner. For the first time it is easy. For the first time, feel like other girls. Year one, make love regularly; meet his parents; fight and reconcile like real adults. Year two is harder. Feel lost and stuck and like a failure all the time. Stare at girls holding hands and wonder if you’re a LUG after all. Go to the last lesbian bar in the city and sip a vodka cranberry just to see. No one talks to you, and this confirms all your fears. You’ve never told him so one day, in the car, tell the runner that you used to date women. When he looks curious, show him, without thinking, a picture of Jane. She’s really cute, he says, did you ever have a threesome? Sit silently for a moment, then ask him to drive you home. After you get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you can.

19. Move home. Your mom pours you glasses of wine and neither of you talks about why you’re there. Turn twenty-six. Whenever someone asks what’s next, say I don’t know. While cleaning, find your old saxophone under your childhood bed. Dust off your stand-up bass. Buy garage band and compose something you really like.

One day, your mother comes home from the grocery store. I saw one of your friends from high school, she says. She said to say hello. Spend twenty minutes composing a text. Arrange to meet for drinks and pick a spot at the bar where you can see the door. When she walks in, she looks the same—maybe a little wider and her face a little more defined—but still Jane to her core.

Embrace. Talk over each other and laugh as you each try to fill in the last nine years. Jane isn’t a rock star or a firefighter or the president. She works on computers for the county and likes it. She has two dogs and one first place pickleball tournament trophy and a girlfriend she wants to marry. Tell her about yourself, and then in the middle of the third round, say, I had a crush on you in high school. Jane puts both her hands on your knees and says, I was like in love with you. You both find this extremely funny. When you ask why nothing ever happened, Jane frowns. I think I was afraid you only liked boys. But I should have known. Straight girls don’t read Anaïs Nin.

But you’ve never known what you are. Look at Jane and tell her this, that you know you’re not straight, but you don’t think you’re gay, and you’re afraid to be something in between. When she asks you why, say you don’t know how.

Jane orders another round. So you’re bi, she says. That’s cool! I used to think there were all these rules, all these ‘right ways’ to be. But now I think that might be crap.

We’re all weirdos, you say, raising your glass. No one is normal!

Jane raises hers too. Exactly, she says. Which just means everybody is.

20. Spend another year living at home, a few more after that dating the wrong people. Keep writing music. Follow that to California, where you compose jingles for commercials before landing a movie. It’s a horror film and you feel good, like you’ve made it. Then fail to book another movie for a year. Start to realize that your career may not be linear; that it may peak and valley and flatline. That with time it will get better.

You’re almost thirty and it’s 2020; the world is shit but you’re ok and Obama comes out with a second book where he writes that he once loved an ethereal bisexual. Wonder if you, too, are an ethereal bisexual. Look up the definition of “ethereal” and find words like “delicate” and “light” and “too perfect for this world,” which don’t sound like you. Am I an ethereal bisexual? you text Jane. You’re a corporeal bisexual, she texts back, even better. Laugh. Believe her.