A photo of the author taken the year she came out

I remember the moment it happened — the single spark that set my body aflame.

Cecelia stood behind me on the Pilates reformer and pressed her legs into my back, her hands into my shoulders. The strength of her long, lean limbs drove me into submission. Her perfectly-highlighted blonde hair tickled the back of my neck.

“Connect your pubic bone to your sternum. Hold it.”

Her voice was deep, throaty.

“Even while I’m pushing you — hold it. And breathe.”

But I could not breathe. There was no oxygen left in the room. It had been consumed by her touch, her fire.

Spontaneous combustion.

My chest heaved with the weight of this recognition. It felt simultaneously familiar and forbidden, known and mysterious, natural and foreign. I searched for air as every nerve in my body shouted, This! This is who you are. This is who you’ve always been.

Out of nowhere, in an instant, she burned me to the ground, along with all of the preconceived notions I had about attraction and desire.

***

I had married my husband, Charles, 25 years earlier, after seven years of dating. We’d attended the same high school, and had been cast opposite each other in our spring production of Fiddler on the Roof. On one of our first dates, he told me about a reoccurring dream he’d had since he was young.

“It happens almost every night,” he said. “I dream about this woman in a rocking chair in a dark, quiet room. Her back is to me, it’s the middle of the night, and she is holding a baby. I take the baby from her and send her back to bed. I never saw the woman’s face until I met you. But it’s you, Katrina. You’re the one.”

That’s how Charles convinced me we were supposed to be together. I was unsure that we were the right match, but he made it seem like our future had been written in the stars. How could I argue with the stars? But also, who had dreams about kids and wives at sixteen? I couldn’t even handle my own emotions. Kids were not on my radar. Spouses were not either.

Twenty-five years in, however, we’d made a good life: four beautiful kids, a big house in the suburbs, fancy cars, advanced education and a solid career for him, a homemaker’s life for me. On the outside, we were the perfect family. But there was something about the skin of suburbia that never quite fit me.

When Cecelia touched me on the reformer that day, I began the long journey to understanding why, beginning with my childhood.

I was raised in a world where gay was not really an option. Or at least not a desirable one. My Granny used to call our local TV star, Cowboy Bob, “Gay Bob” because she mistakenly thought that was his name. We all thought it was hilarious. Gay was funny. Gay was foreign. Gay was whispers and giggles behind backs. Gay was a slur.

“Gay” was a hard word for me to say at all, let alone in reference to myself. “Lesbian” was even harder. “Queer” was so offensive that my big sister, Cora, and I weren’t allowed to say it when we were young, so we called each other “quee” instead.

"Here I am growing out my gray and smooching my special needs rescue pup, Sissy," the author writes.

***

As my obsession with Cecelia grew, Charles and I talked at length about what was happening in our lives and in my heart.

“Why her?” he asked. “What’s the draw? She’s not even very nice to you.”

“I can’t explain it,” I said. “But it’s all-consuming. I go to bed thinking about her. I wake up thinking about her. It’s not anything I chose. It just is.”

We talked about my propensity to form unusually strong female bonds, to dive headfirst into my closest relationships. I thought long and hard about my best friend in high school and how jealous I became when she chose another friend and turned our duo into a trio. I recalled my girlhood crushes on camp counsellors who occupied more than their fair share of space in my head. I reminisced about a female high school teacher whose after-school classroom became my daily destination, a space that I craved intensely so I could spend more time with her.

“Does this feel different than friendship?” he asked.

I nodded, even though I couldn’t quite articulate why.

Charles then confronted me with the biggest question of my life: “Are you gay?”

“I don’t know,” I told Charles as I began crying. “I joined this secret online group of late-in-life........

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