“I wanted her to smile at me that way. I wanted her to say my name. This turned out to be easy.”

In the pool hall, my sweetheart and a close friend tease me one night: “unimpressive,” “pure luck,” “you aren’t that good.” They were trying to get my ire up so that an hour later when I told them to stare into each other’s eyes as I fucked my sweetheart’s body, I would mean it with a snarky competitive vengeance, I would mean it with power and control, I would be pushed to take what I want.

“When her body shook I was filled with a fullness that almost made me cry. For me, in that moment, Dan wasn’t even in the room.”

The kind of miniseries that seems like a great idea when your fever is at its highest, truly.

I found a different self slowly, learned to exist as if with many different goggles on at once. Always speaking from my mother’s kitchen in the Silicon Valley and, at the same time, my grandmother’s crowded living room in Punjab. In these years, I would feel the sharpness of many kinds of difference, marginalization. But when I looked down at myself for signs of why I felt so other, all I would find was the color of my hands.

“I always went the extra mile for you and did so gladly because I loved being around you. You never returned these more concrete gestures, which should’ve been the first sign that things were not reciprocal between us, but I was oblivious and idealistic. I genuinely believed I had found love.”

“Zoey and I tried to feed our cravings for simple American cuisine, but despite our clever substitutions and meticulous adjustments and innovative ingredients from the bazaar, nothing tasted quite right. Not bad, just not what we’d been looking for.”

“Last week I found one of those butter-coloured strands on my dress, and wondered. Then I realised it was one of my own, greying hairs. Ten years have passed, and she’s straight now, living with the boyfriend I introduced her to nine and a half years ago.”

In general, my bi friends understand the alienation, erasure and self-doubt that comes with being bisexual in a “can’t you just pick one” world. By seeing and believing each other’s negative experiences, we help each other reduce the harm of those things.

“People are usually surprised to hear things about my past, like how I was a cheerleader, and in a sorority, and a dancer, and in musical theatre.”

“Presenting as male every day hurts. When the ship is in port, it’s not as bad; I grow to hate coming in to work, but once the day ends I can go home and be myself. When we’re underway, it’s worse. I’m stuck being ‘him’ all day, every day. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks… once, for months.”

“Your truth is always your truth, whether said or silent. It just might not be the idea of your truth that somebody else has in their mind.”

“Other people built a gender for me and trusted that I would defend what they built. But what I was handed never made sense.”

I stopped hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017 because of toxic masculinity and bro culture in the hiking community. It exists, it’s shitty, and it fucked me up.

LGBTQ representation in literature is important. Also, chicken picatta is delicious.

As the daughter of lesbian mothers, I always knew I had a sperm donor, and that I could meet him when I was 18. I loved my moms; I loved my queer family. Still, I had always wondered what part of me was cut from a different cloth.

“They were a union organizer and liked to throw themed parties (for example: Naked Brunch). One time I bought Gap jeans and they called me a capitalist pig dog. They were not wrong.”

“Loving women and loving the land are the two things I told myself I would never do, and somehow, they got all tangled up in each other.”

“Who was this country-music-loving New Englander? I both hated and loved that she seemed to be playing this garbage as if to impress me.”

It’s 2017, and married power lesbians Jenny Schecter and Shane McCutcheon face some tough stuff only days before Carmen De La Pica Morales is coming in for a weekend visit that turns out a whole lot cooler than anybody could’ve predicted.