The Bisexual Ghost

And the girls who broke my heart

It’s October of 2017 in Los Angeles. Summer’s flirt still hangs in the air, rustling the palm trees and painting the sky pink at sunset. Despite the warmth that rises even from the ground, you can’t help but carry a thrifted jean jacket with you everywhere you go. You’re a NorCal girl at heart so you’re always anticipating a sudden change in seasons. Call it progress, but tonight you left the jacket at home.

You’re teetering on Swedish Hasbeens as your date tugs you by the hand up the stairs to your seats at the Hollywood Bowl. You follow the older man with total trust, letting your gaze float over the hillside as he leads you. He’s wearing a leather jacket, one you long to feel him wrap around your shoulders, not as confirmation of the change of seasons, but of what you mean to him. You’re always looking for signs like this. Ever since your second date four months ago, when in the dim light of the Los Feliz 3, before the movie began, he draped a napkin over your lap and opened up a conversation about safe words like he was casually drawing your attention to the fake stars on the ceiling above. When all the talking turned to action, he paddled you until your twenty-five-year-old ass bore the bruises you’d always craved. You drove to the only grocery store open at three in the morning and went home to sleep on a bag of frozen corn. But not before documenting your butt in a warped Ikea mirror with your cracked iPhone. Your reflection telling the story of a stranger wearing your bra and sitting on your gray fake wood floor.

You’ve felt it coming for weeks now. The way your doe eyes lock onto his when you’re doing a particularly brutal pain scene. The way you freeze when he puts his hand on your leg in the car. The way he sees you before you see yourself. How you feel comfortable being quiet with him. You’re lowering your heart towards a flame, like dipping your little pink fingers into wax as a child. You’ve learned your desire for consensual pain is not, as you assumed, some disfigurement in the development of your heart, but a way for you to feel real. To feel gratitude for your own body. You want to find out if letting yourself fall for him might be the kind of delicious pain that proves you’re alive.

But the revelations you experience under his riding crop, flogger, and paddle don’t magically transform all pain into good pain. You’re reminded of bad pain when you realize he’s curating these experiences in others too. You see missed calls on his phone. Notifications whizzing past, Doppler effect, as you try to stand still with him. There’s one Other Girl in particular, and it guts you when he leaves you for a date she’s planned across town. He drives forty minutes west and rests his hand on her tattooed thigh. He’s insistent you’re his primary sub, reminding you of the meaning behind the collar you wear even to sleep, but you still find her on social media to fact-check his commitment. Every last one of her pictures tells you she’s got the bad girl thing figured out better than you ever will. She looks like she could be your slightly younger, more rebellious sister, like she knows how to ride a motorcycle and has a casual adderall habit. Like she, unlike you, knows what she’s doing.

As the opening band is packing up at the Bowl, you can feel his aura change, his pulse quicken. Turns out the Other Girl is here, and she wants to come say hello. You body offers you a rush of adrenaline, bells and lights going off urging you to run or put up your fists. But as she arrives, as though from behind a phantom bush atop the paved-over chaparral, you default to your most familiar response. You freeze.

He kisses her on the cheek. Her smile is adorable and he elicits it easily. Your hand flies up to your collar. You twist its hardware a little defensively, maybe wishing it would catch some light from the stage and glare at her the way you want to but know you can’t. She is a grid post come to life. And just as quickly as she came, she is gone. As though swiped away. But you’ve looked each other in the eye now. The game is on.

The National take the stage and you can hardly breathe during I Need My Girl. You feel a direct line running from you to her, wherever she is in the crowd.

Skip forward to 2021. The older man is now your husband. You’ve weathered the pandemic together in a small apartment. You watched your city get hollowed out together. You bought bunches of kale and packets of yeast from places that used to be restaurants, you FaceTimed in the bathtub and Netflix partied and had a freaky experience with the Other Side during a guided holotropic breathwork session over Zoom. You got vaccinated together in a parking lot on a rainy Tuesday. And then the world began to thaw.

You remember the morning after the 2016 election, when a guy who fingered you once in college like-bombed ten of your Instagram photos at five a.m. This time has the same frantic energy. You’re standing in the kitchen doing dishes with an unfamiliar dish soap, the only one you could find at the store, when your husband delicately tells you the Other Girl has reached out again. But rather than materializing on the plains, a heat mirage, she is just text on a screen. A notification whizzing past. The Other Girl, by all accounts an Other Woman now, lives in New York, is finishing her masters, and, like everyone, is wondering about the people she knew before everything changed. We’ll call her M.

With uncanny ease, you slip right back into the stomach-churning anxiety of being 25 again. You remember him holding you from behind at the Phoebe Bridgers concert in a dark wood-paneled masonic lodge over York Boulevard. The whole night felt lit by amber filament bulbs. He told you M fantasized about being friends with you, sharing him, forming a constellation together. Your body felt electric. All that fight or flight energy still crackling through you. Onstage Phoebe sang about sending nudes and it felt like sad girls ran the world. Phoebe kissed her friends in matching sets of lingerie on Instagram. You projected yourself and M into that position, kissing on the changing room floor. You felt the gale force jealousy funneling into a crush.

Mere months after that initial meeting at the National concert, the three of you came together in his apartment, and you eyed the place on his dresser where he’d once forgotten to put away a ball gag that was still laced with her spit. The two of you never got to kiss, because the threesome unraveled almost as quickly as it began despite all the well-intentioned negotiation and planning. At first it was hard to see that she had used you as an instrument of her own masochism, that you were part of a pain she thought she deserved. As he was walking her to her car she told him his kink was a mask she wanted him to take off. He took you to get fast food around the corner and you listened to how it all played out, a little ashamed of the feeling of victory that was bashing against your ribs. You fed him fries as he drove. It was a place both of you had been before, but now you had each other.

28-year-old You still has conflicted feelings about M. But she’s coming to town in a month and you’re all curious about each other again. You’re viewing her through a vintage camera lens shrouded in pantyhose. An old Hollywood glimmer on the past. You never speak with her directly, but she sends him long texts, texts you have to scroll twice or three times to see in their entirety, about how she regrets storming out, how she thinks of you both still, how she understands the terms now, how she has grown up.

Quickly the Long Texts become sketches of the future. Everyone you know is talking about living outside the city. On a farm. You read The Faggots And Their Friends Between Revolutions in an A-Frame cabin in Crestline, a mountain town whose name you hear in the French-accented voice of Sylvère Lotringer in the I Love Dick audiobook that lulls you to sleep. You crave an open vista and misshapen homegrown food. She’s speaking your language to him as she crafts textual fantasies about helping with your future baby, chasing the hypothetical child around a patch of squash. Your idle hours, of which there are many, fill with thoughts of the two of you in matching sun hats, pulling Swiss chard and kissing in the golden hour over a handwoven basket. Him building a fire. The fantasy surrounds you like the persistent night-blooming fragrance of honeysuckles and star jasmine. The blossom of something queer and real and safe. She pollinates it with those texts, whizzing back and forth thousands of miles with ease.

As you get ready to meet up with M, outdoors, fear is still your reflex. And not just because getting within six feet of other human bodies has meant mutually assured destruction for over a year now. The weight of the fantasy meeting the remnants of your old jealousy and hesitation feels like it could open up a black hole. There’s no chance of her ‘winning’ him, you’re married now, but your lizard brain still needs to be reminded that you’re more than a shadow. You’re a main character in her rural fantasies. Your name peppers the Long Texts.

And yet as your shoes crunch the gravel, as you come upon her sitting in the sun, all black outfit, sunglasses just so, sleeves of tattoos freshly lotioned, you still feel like an outsider. Watching them talk, you feel like you’ve walked in on the middle of a movie and have hit your allotment of clarifying questions. You recede a bit, watch the lights and colors flash by. But he drags you back in, and you follow the echoes of the Texts to their source. She becomes real. He’s happy to see you happy. This is what it has always been about for him.

The next few days feel lit by the same glow as your fantasies. It’s sunset when the two of you kneel face to face and finally, haltingly, kiss. Her nose is cold up against yours and you long to warm all of her in the golden light of that vegetable patch. Despite all the missteps before, there’s a dreamlike ease to the proceeding flashes of time together, like they’re previews before a longer story.

There’s the night spent bowling at Shatto: you watch her buy socks from a vending machine, he kisses both of you when he bowls a strike, you and M hold hands and tease him. His arms stretch around both of you. You all go home together and the wholesomeness folds over into a tangle of bodies, her mouth and gentle puppy dog skin are like the water in a flotation tank. You disappear in the most delicious way. You fall asleep together in a tiny bed and you dream of feeding her passionfruit. You wake up to them kissing, you all intertwine again, then you make him an espresso, matchas for yourself and M. You drink them together, hair mussed and matching green mustaches.

M goes home to New York and shortly after the two of you follow. It’s pride month and everyone on the subway is naked and sweating. You stick to every surface you touch, including her. Katz’s Deli, Japanese whiskey, a scrawl on the sidewalk that reads eating p*ssy cures depression. You reach for her hand in the sheets at the Public Hotel, the room softly glowing high in the air. Each of you takes off one of his shoes. Each of you tucks into one of his sides for aftercare. Sharing makes more. You go out for natural wine and sourdough pizza the next day and ask each other for your life stories. You both feel seen rather than watched. The allusions to the future continue. She gets a little drunk and begs him to kiss you. You walk her home and the three of you hold each other under a Bushwick streetlamp, everything quiet except the train.

But she can’t let a day go by without hedging her bets. Trying to get close to her is like dancing with a partner who can’t decide whether to lead or follow. You sit on her living room floor, staring at the Chinese money plant in the corner, the one she doesn’t rotate because she wants to watch it arc towards the light. She’s been asking to have a talk, and the time finally comes. She qualifies her feelings for both of you. She talks about her therapist. She reminds you she’s getting out of a relationship. She both cautions against any expectations of her, but wants some kind of commitment in return. At a certain point you go cross-eyed, the worst-case scenarios waltzing through the room make it feel uncomfortably crowded. You watched Moonstruck on the plane from LA. Cosmo’s moon peers in the casement window and you want to chew off your own hand like a wolf.

When you were twenty-one you spent a New York summer weekend with another available/unavailable girl. You fell for C in your study-abroad program. She was a boarding school bad girl from Chengdu, and spoke a handful of languages. You were always finding her in the Venn diagram overlap of the linguistics you shared, shit-talking in your learned Mandarin and flirting in rudimentary German. As midnights hit in Berlin, C asked you a hundred questions about how you knew you were bi. She wove fairy tales about coming back to Kreuzberg to make art together one day. She pressed into your side in the Metropolis section of the film museum, everything black and white except her ever-swinging red origami swan earrings. In the nightclub down by the train tracks, you danced nose to nose. Your bodies syncing in their softness. You whispered to her in Chinese that you wanted to kiss her. But the word for ‘kiss,’ qīn wěn, sounds like ‘can I ask you,’ qǐng wèn. ‘What do you want to ask me?’ she said. ‘Ask me anything.’

No matter how you said it, your desire came out as a question.

After saying goodbye to her on a train platform, you sent each other self-serious Facebook messages for a year. Long Messages the precursor to Long Texts which themselves are just Long Sapphic Letters, a queer girl tradition that connects you to Emily Dickinson and Sappho and every teen on Tumblr. She invited you to come visit her in her last year of school. At the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights you tripped over your suitcase as you went to hug hello. You’d both gotten the pixie cuts that were everywhere that year, femme-on-femme hair-braiding fantasies fading like the smoke she used to blow into your mouth during a night out.

She asked about your boyfriend. She knew about the proto-openness you negotiated with him. Knew that queerness for you had mostly been peering out at women from the inside of a relationship. Over Cuba Libres in a dark bar, she confessed with a cruel shrug that she was consciously trying to make you fall in love with her back in Berlin. Just to see if she could do it. And that she wasn’t like you. She was ‘normal.’ But we can still be friends.

Back in her dorm, because where else were you going to go, she spread a sheet mask over your face. She went down the hall to the bathroom and you hovered at the window. It looked out at a hundred other windows, all suspended over the center courtyard of the building. 10 stories down, the dry and scrubby plants had been heaped with trash: chairs thrown from above, blue books, snack wrappers. You gazed down into the miniature wasteland and its accumulated junk. But then you caught sight of your own reflection floating in the dim light, a mouth and two eye holes in a Noh mask of white. A ghost wandering the wreckage.

Holding hands with your husband in the Public Hotel, in 2021, you finally feel fully inside of something. He tucks your hair behind your ear and says you’ll always be safe with him. You sit up on the bed and look with slow purpose at the reflection of your skin in the window, your gold shoulder peeking out from the crumple of sheets. You square off against your outline, the grecian mound of your hip. You’re floating over the New York skyline, but you can hardly see the city beyond.

You get back to LA and the taste of the orange wine in Bushwick in the steamy summer fades. You all struggle to find your footing. M sends you links to love poems filled with allusions. Sometimes that’s all she sends. You react, you share your favorite parts, she doesn’t respond. This continues for weeks. You don’t know what it means to get a love poem and nothing else, the Long Texts replaced not only by hyperlinks, but someone else’s words.

You much prefer infatuation to this gradual unspooling. You try to hang on to the feeling of her hand in the sheets, her morning hair, watching her hold his hand across the front seat of her car as you rode in the back, her little feet in thick rented socks, the lights of Dodger Stadium in May and sharing a hot dog three ways, the wholesomeness and co-conspiracy of it all, the feeling of rubbing her rescued pitbull’s silky belly on the floor of her apartment, that money plant spreading good fortune towards the sun.

But you also remember the feeling of her always treating him like bad news. The feeling of having to make up a debt. You wonder if your heart is just a projection on a wall to her, bands of light she’s making shadow puppets in. Hearts and birds and wolves.

She comes back to LA on a road trip with her best friend who doesn’t approve. She proposes coffee in the canyon like checking in on her threeway love affair was a classic stop on Route 66. You’re just a giant ball of string for her to take a photo next to while passing through town. It’s the coffee you have during a breakup, but the breakup never comes. You wonder if you made up the Long Texts. It would be so easy if she would just let it. So part of you hangs on.

She leaves you in the canyon but never really leaves. She still watches your Instagram stories. She likes your posts. She sends you flowers on your wedding anniversary. The poems still come, jolting you when you think you’ve let it go. In the beginning, when you watched each other on social media, neither of you knew anything about the other. But now, you’re watching intimacy fade into haunting. Something known becoming unknown. A rejection so soft it’s like a wisp of cold air.

The poems stop altogether. A year goes by. More.

She’s in town again and you plan a night together. She asks him to ask you to do her tarot for the year ahead. If your heart was once a projection on a wall it has now fractured into disconnected pixels. The vegetal fantasies are just a collection of slides you’ve misplaced and half remember. In the space between the light and images, there’s a lingering pain.

He tells you it would be good to say how you feel. You’re fully dressed and ready to step out the door. The two of you sit at your table and talk about whether you need to tidy up any more, maybe change the sheets, if there’s a remote possibility of her coming back to your place. You decide not, definitely not. He gets a text. She’s not coming. The numerology told you her card of the year is Death. You never get a chance to tell her.

You recline on your couch and stare out the window at the lawn where coyotes cross in the gloaming hours. Mouths open in mirthless smiles, they retire from their shift hunting squirrels and neighborhood cats to the wilds beyond. Against all your better instincts, you interrupt your own fight or flight. You feel.

You discovered your queerness at a time when it was all about body counts, gender tallying, bisexuality conferred upon you in the eyes of others. You kissed friends in tongues soaked with green apple vodka. You made new tones of lipstick. You spun the bottle, whoever sat at the spout proof of what was inside you, but only if they kissed you back. Back then, you didn’t know that you weren’t responsible for collecting receipts. That being desired didn’t define you. Your desire was always enough.

Twilight settles outside the window, and the ghost of your bisexuality comes home from rambling the earth. Its blood-soaked muzzle and wild eyes glint as it circles your belly and lies softly down, fitting comfortably inside the body it came from. A creature that wounds and has also been wounded. Its twitching limbs soften. It takes a deep, shuddering breath.

You make yourself a pinky-promise: no more bifurcation, just being. Building your queerness from the opinions of others has been like trying to hold water in your hands. Fluidity is a river that begins to rise from the floor. It meets you where you lie, laps against your skin. It’s the same temperature as your body. It says you’ll live a whole life in the sunshine of that golden hour if you learn to let go. If you learn that you are made of love. That there’s nothing to wait for. That there’s nothing to do.

You close your eyes, stop efforting, and allow yourself to be carried downstream.

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