the expectation to be “tough” or “completely loyal” to one man created a lonely feeling in me because it was never talked about, just an unspoken expectation. In fact, there was an evening around that time when I watched Bohemian Rhapsody, and a line in the movie really hit home. Toward the end, Freddie Mercury says, “Do you know when you’ve gone rotten, really rotten? Fruit flies. Dirty little fruit flies, coming to feast on what’s left.” The quote encapsulated how I was feeling at that point: not great about the choices I’d made, the things I’d stayed quiet about, and some of the people I
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