Dear heart,

I have spent many years thinking about the way that you work in tandem with the body that surrounds you. I have spent years navigating the way in which you hold the sharp swords of memory:

“How can you love me if you don’t want to have sex?”

or

“How can you expect anyone to love you if you don’t want to have sex?”

So plainly and caringly spoken, and yet these are river-wounds running deep.

You do not function the way that other hearts do.

Dear heart,

I have spent many hours piecing you back together after learning that to be bi and grey-ace in this world is to be rejected. To be everything and nothing all at once. I am still examining what it means to be Christian and queer. I am finding ways to end the war I started with myself by giving space to my past and my present. I am finding peace by showing love to others. I am showing love to myself by trusting you to tell me when I'm seeing a person worth loving.

I have hidden from myself and from others for too long. I am making you this promise:

I will not shy away from what is difficult.

I will not hide under the bed like a monster of my own creation.

I will not allow others to ignore me because I am not what they were expecting.

I will not hand over this body to be shaped into someone else’s idea of attractive.

Dear heart,

I am sorry. You have been telling me for years: listen, listen, this is how you feel. This is the true north you are looking for. Instead I closed my ears and let myself be guided by others’ poles of attraction: “Isn’t he handsome? Wow, now she’s a 10.”

When I found a person that made my heart jump and skip a beat, I couldn’t explain what triggered it. I listened to her talk, her passion of academia making the rest of the world fall away. Like an arrow, I was shot from my resting place and then I was stuck – and all I could see was her.

Dear heart,

For years, I tried to will myself to feel what they told me to feel. I have had sleepless nights trying to reciprocate in that way, to articulate love through words that feel foreign and fall flat. I have tried to prove that what I feel is love to others who are focused on misunderstanding me. All this time, you have whispered to me: love does not have one shape. I have been trying to steel myself against this needle of a world, knowing that things will be better if I relax, but I have been unable to release the stress. It is exhausting.

Again, you coax me into letting go, let it go, saying: you will find it like a soft fluttering flick, like a cat’s tail against your palm. Your attraction is cautious, wanting to know someone before it will come out of hiding. You will find it in the shape of someone’s smile or in the way they move their head. Your love is a sunrise that paints the sky in different ways for different people. Your way of being attracted to others will be confusing, but it will also be illuminating, and you will be stronger for it each time.

You tell me,

This is how it feels.

I am listening now.