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To all the butches and femmes, past, present, and future
Lily, still holding her half-eaten drumstick, looked away from the stage uncomfortably. She didn’t understand the shrinking feeling inside her, as if she shouldn’t be caught looking at those girls.
Something went still inside Lily, as if her heart had taken a breath before it continued beating.
She couldn’t put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look—and, by looking, to know.
She’d always thought there was something magical about the city, with its steep stairways and sudden glimpses of the bay between tall, narrow buildings. It felt expansive and full of promise, each half-hidden opening a reminder that the city she had been born in still held mysteries to discover.
She knew that what she had read in Strange Season was not only scandalous, it was perverse. She should feel dirtied by reading it; she should feel guilty for being thrilled by it. The problem was, she didn’t. She felt as if she had finally cracked the last part of a code she had been puzzling over for so long that she couldn’t remember when she had started deciphering it. She felt exhilarated.
A question hovered in the back of her throat, tangled up with the paralyzing sensation of being on the cusp of connection. She couldn’t put it into words.
Now she was confused, as if she’d been reading a book that had several pages removed, but hadn’t realized the pages were gone until this moment.
“They kissed each other,” she reported, and saying it out loud was thrilling; it made her blush. And yet she couldn’t say the word the book had used to describe those kinds of girls: lesbian. The word felt dangerous, and also powerful, as if uttering it would summon someone or something—a policeman to arrest them for saying that word, or even worse, a real-life lesbian herself.
Are you like the girls in the book too? Because I think I am.
It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.
“Just between you and me, I think women are better than men at math,” Aunt Judy added slyly.
似曾相識, Judy thought. The sensation of having already met someone, or what the French called déjà vu, the feeling of having already seen something. There was probably a scientific explanation for it, but the older she got, the more she was inclined to give in to the feeling that these moments were glimpses into a world greater than this physical one. It was as if there were cycles that repeated themselves over and over, but most people never saw the repetition; they were too deeply enmeshed in their own path to see.
Lily raised her fingers to her lips as if to touch the last trace of Kath’s mouth on hers. She felt a queer giddiness overtaking her, as if her body might float up from the ground because she was so buoyant with this lightness, this love.
