Warning: beautiful, heartfelt, sexy, raw adult language and situations ahead!

Be born.

Be a baby for a while.

Grow up.

(Optional): Know you love women, but become forced to hide it due to shitty factors outside of your control. Believe a myriad of lies about yourself that are associated with loving women and perpetuated by people whose lives are filled with more fear than love.

Maybe you will hate yourself. Maybe you will hurt yourself.

Maybe you will feel utterly alone, abandoned by the people and god that were supposed to love you.

Maybe the pain will force you into a dark and seemingly inescapable place before you can see how much you deserve to be loved.

Maybe you don’t make it to the next step. I really hope you do. Trust me, it’s worth it—more than you can imagine.

(Optional Option #2): Think that you like men first. Maybe date a few of them. Maybe date a lot of them. Maybe even like it. Maybe hate it with a fiery passion. Maybe just be “okay” with it, totally unaware that you’ve been living woefully beneath your sexual and romantic potential.

Subconsciously accept heterosexuality as humankind’s amorous default setting without even considering the possibility of being with a woman.

Eventually, you will:

Meet a girl who makes butterflies magically appear in your abdomen whenever you see her, whose face radiates sunshine and whose laugh is so intoxicating it makes whiskey seem like flat Perrier. A girl under whose gaze you fear your poor overworked heart might just fling itself right out of your chest and make a run for it, no longer able to keep up with the rigorous demands required just to be near her.

Realize that you would really, really like to kiss her.

(Optional): Realize that she’s very straight, or in a relationship, or just not interested. Be crushed. Vow never to love again. Eat a lot of sweets and stay in bed. Google local nunneries in your chosen faith (or solitary volunteer opportunities for the faithless). Dedicate yourself to your art/studies/job/cat. Be suddenly arrested by an overwhelming grief over the fact that you don’t have a penis or a Y chromosome, even though you really want neither.

Eventually find another girl, one that makes you totally forget ol’ what’s-her-face, and realize that you would really, really, really like to kiss her…and that she wants that, too.

Kiss her.

Become filled with doubt over the existence of basic physical laws which moments ago seemed immutable, such as: gravity, the flow of time, the body as being solid and separate from the infinite universe, etc.

Discover that the reason your lips exist are to feel the softness of hers.

Revel in the singular euphoria of feeling a nipple harden against your tongue for the first time.

Bury your tongue inside her and truly believe that you will never be hungry again, because all tastes are bland compared to the ambrosial sweetness of her desire for you.

Realize that you never knew how good smiling could feel until you did it with your lips brushing the wet clit of a woman who’s begging you in ragged gasps to keep going, because she’s almost there.

Drink in every detail of her face as she comes in your arms, and for a single precious space in time know that nothing exists but this moment, here, feeling the waves of her ecstasy against your body.

Kiss her forehead eyelids cheeks neck jawline lips softly as the waves settle, letting her know how grateful you are to witness her beauty in rapture, to worship at her temple.

Repeat.

Switch roles.

Repeat.

(Etc., until your bodies are engulfed by a variety of aches and are too exhausted to move.)

Experience the most real and true quiet you’ve ever known—a quietness of heart, of body, of mind, of all sounds save the rustle of the sheets and the sound of her breath.

Let your limbs become entwined with hers, bodies held so close as if they’re trying to melt into one, lips pressed into the soft swell of her breasts, riding the rise and fall of her breathing seamlessly into a sleep you won’t remember falling into.

Wake up.

See all things as if for the first time. (And maybe her face fully in daylight actually for the first time.)

Move about the world in stupefied wonder. Are colors suddenly…brighter? Is the sun more…sunny? Why is everything so beautiful?

How have you gone so many days without falling to your knees in exaltation of all the unsung exquisiteness of the world you’ve up till now foolishly taken for granted?

Believe that this feeling will last forever.

Find out that it doesn’t.

Have your heart really and truly broken.

Retreat into your bed. Break out the sweets. Go back to Googling those nunneries and lives of solitude. Understand where the phrase “cry your guts out” actually comes from. Re-dedicate your life to your art/studies/job/cat.

Vow never to love again. You mean it this time.

Love again. Better and more deeply.

Maybe she’s the one.

Maybe she’s not.

Maybe you realize you don’t believe in a “one.”

Maybe you realize that figuring out “how to be a lesbian” is nonsensical, because how can you be taught to be what you already are?

Maybe you finally realize that the only one who can define for you what it is to be a lesbian is you.

Maybe you admit to yourself that you hate plaid and are more of a dog person and think that The L Word wasn’t all that great and really don’t get why everyone thinks Shane is so hot.

Maybe you still like plaid and adopt two more cats and want to take Shane for a ride around the block.

Maybe you just leave yourself the hell alone and let yourself be whoever you are, because there actually isn’t another option.

Maybe everyone else learns to settle the fuck down and stop trying to make you fit into a clearly-defined box that makes them feel more comfortable.

Maybe we can all accept that the universe is just chaos that happens to loosely follow certain patterns, and that labels and categories are just frail inventions with which our limited minds play at grasping an incomprehensible reality.

Maybe we can all just not be dicks to each other, regardless of what imaginary group we belong to, simply because it’s a better way to spend the small and precious time we have on this miraculous green and blue ball floating in space.

Maybe.

Hopefully.

Author: Solana Mejia

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: marcogomes at Flickr