Branches in All Directions

“Alas, if only I was a lesbian,” my straight friends lament, especially after each new heartbreak. Aren't women innately more self-aware, empathetic, adept at talking things through? “It must be so much easier,” they argue, as if queerness could be an antidote to patriarchy. As if, in the absence of men, we might be guaranteed a safer brand of love.“If only,” I say back. Barely sixteen tucking beer bottles in our bras as Brooke and I barreled toward the basement, broke free from our clothes, hips blooming to Beyoncé.In the mirror, we compared the bulge of our stomachs, belly buttons, the burst of hair on our toes. I showed her the blue birthmark on my ass, one of many signs that meant no boy would ever want me. Brooke insisted they'd be too distracted by my big boobs to notice. I tried my best to believe her.As she booty popped to the beat, my skin blotched and I burned to come closer. I'd never seen her so bewitched with her own power. I became bewitched with my own.In bed, I breathed sea breeze onto her neck, the swell of her breasts, and she kissed me back with eyes like closed crescents. In the morning, before she called her boyfriend, she asked me what this meant.“I think I'm bi,” I said.“I think I'm straight,” she replied.We blamed the alcohol and never spoke of it again. Can I tell you a secret? I slept in my mother's bed until I was thirteen. The few times that my dad and stepmother came by our house, my mother creased cupcake sheets onto the bed I never slept in and crowned it with a flock of unconvincing pillows.I spent my childhood traveling the changing constellations between my mom's house, my dad & stepmother's house, and the many cities each lived in. All three parents cared in their own way, but my mother was the one I trusted. She created fantasy worlds with me, coddled my sorrows, let me climb onto her lap whenever I wanted. We were too close, chastised my dad and stepmother. They believed in clearly delineated boundaries: bedtimes, groundings, and the separate clothes they made me wear at their house, as if everything my mother touched—even the clothing she dressed me in—was unclean.I tried to suck in my feelings and control the chaos, but I couldn't help it. I cried constantly about missing my mother, which caused my stepmom to collapse into sobs or disappear to smoke a thousand cigarettes. I learned that it was shameful, this way my mother loved me, this way I loved her back.We slept curled around each other, her warmth in the dark my consolation. Her body the closest I could ever come to home. Desires radiated all directions at once. I wanted that boy in eighth period to dip his deep brown eyes into my cleavage. I wanted to dazzle that senior girl with the depth of my MySpace diaries, dare her to get stoned with me in the middle of the day. I wanted to be like Tori Amos, red-haired and bleeding wild onto every stage.At college on the other side of the country, I discovered one-night stands & psychedelics & domesticity & what happens when you bite a woman's nipple too hard. I dreamt about dropping to my knees for my ex-Soviet professor, who drew air plants on the chalkboard and lauded their ability to survive without soil. Who made me believe that I too could distance myself from the dirt of where I'd come from.As the years progressed, I discovered I didn't ever know what I wanted until I'd tried it. Until I'd extended out my arms to touch, to smell, to taste it for myself. Eternity was how long I thought Elsie and I would be friends, swinging the bottle of cheap red we'd stolen, mesmerized by that endless stretch of sea. Forget term papers, forget parties, forget our boyfriends—those inconvenient extras. We drove west until the sky broke open like a birth. We put on too many sweaters to count and traced footsteps along the edges of waves, spilling secrets like the salt of stars.Eternity was how long I wanted that moment to last—just before graduation, champagne soaked and glitter-sparkling, rolling around the dewy grass as we kissed for the first and only time. A kiss that felt like ocean soaked in sun, that beckoned the whole of me to step inside. I can still taste it. The wet. The endless alive. Friends who are girls have easily flowed through my life, but what is a girlfriend? Foreign crossbreed of fantasies. Salty as kelp unfurling ribbons on the shore. The aftertaste of plums, fragrant with summer's warmth. “Gross,” the man grimaced to his wife, pointing at a geometric blur in the tank ahead. “It's disgusting.” They hurried away, and only then did I grasp what I was looking at.Glued against the aquarium glass, the Giant Pacific Octopus splayed itself naked as an orchid. My throat gripped, sensing I was glimpsing something too private, yet I couldn't look away from this creature, its arms the color of oxidizing hamburger, diaphanous flaps of skin alternately hanging and stretching, its thousands of wide-eyed suckers dilating like wanting eyes.Octopuses grapple with the world through touch—its five hundred million neurons grouped into ganglia, knots of nerve endings that allow each of its eight arms to navigate separately. Not only that, but each of the Giant Pacific's two thousand suckers can grip, smell, and taste independently. Unencumbered by bones or spinal cords, the same octopus can inflate itself fifteen feet long or escape through gaps the width of its eyes. Their bodies ripple with possibility.As I gazed at the octopus, what had at first seemed gruesome became tinged with recognition. In the meaty chain of its suckers and fleshy pink folds, I recognized my own. The braided ridges of my vaginal canal, the exquisite hunger of my sex. As its arms twirled in cursive loops, I recognized the way I dance, my hands becoming one with water's song. I recognized my own curiosity, and all the times it had been maligned. The disgusting animal I'd learned to guard behind glass. Hand in hand in hand in hand, the Four of Us ambled up the hill to my house. We had met in opera camp that summer, hoping against hope that we would all become stars. We were the nerdy ones, the ones who didn't sneak out in the middle of the night to flirt with boys, but instead helped each other remember the silent “H” in Italian and do hundreds of Kegels without anyone noticing. I'd always had one best friend at a time, but four? Four was more than friendship. Four was a family.Now it was the night before New Year's and we were high on Renée Fleming at the Met Opera, high on the thrill and soar of our own voices, high on our hubris at seventeen, the invincibility of our hand in hand in hand in hand. If only the story could have ended there. Just the Four of Us in my bedroom playing that game we had discovered at camp—that game where each of us took turns lying down while the others placed their hands lightly on her clothed body. Just to play, just to learn what we liked. Moaning was just a sign the game was working. That night, after the game, the redhead was just inches from my face. She just looked so pretty, blushing like that. I just wanted to kiss her never-before-kissed mouth and told her so. But she just nudged my nose away. I may have kept asking, but I just don't remember. When the Four of Us became the Three of Them, they were just protecting her. Kraken is a cephalopod sea monster from Nordic folklore known to capsize ships. Described as the “largest and most surprising of all the animal creation” by the Natural History of Norway, the Kraken emerges from the deepest depths and suctions onto the bottom of a boat with the irresistible traction of tens of thousands of suckers, devouring a ship's entire crew at once.The first mention of the Kraken came in 1555, when a Swedish cartographer and clergyman wrote of a sea creature with “sharp and long Horns round about, like a Tree up by the Roots.” In Swedish, the etymology of Kraken derives from the word for “rod,” or “gnarled wood,” nowadays used to describe a person who is useless, pathetic, or cowardly. In Norse, “krake” is a malformed or crooked tree, or a tree that has been uprooted. “Krake” also refers to a crooked person. A sick animal. Lost girls, I call the ones who left me, like Elsie whose kiss signaled a slew of unanswered calls, emails, longings. Whose kiss signaled not the beginning or an eternity. Only silence.Lost girls. The girls I lured. The girls I lost. Mother, who I talk to about everything, doesn't understand this part of me. Every time I've raved to her about a new woman, she withdraws her warmth and I feel the disapproval in her darkened gaze, the clamp of her throat. It's because of me, isn't it? she once dared to ask. By which I've always imagined she meant, how close we were. By which she meant, I didn't give you a father you could count on. By which she meant, I've ruined you.Her shame. How it has mingled with my own. Never again will I confuse the lines between desire and friendship. After so many needless losses, I will not notice or name such feelings. No more leavings, no more loving the wrong way. For the rest of my twenties, I needle that part of myself closed. Octopuses can morph their appearances in milliseconds, changing themselves from electric blue-ringed to unnoticeable as the crag of beige sand. Below their skin are thousands of chromatophores, each containing an elastic sac full of pigment, like a tiny balloon controlled by muscles and nerves unconsciously squeezed and stretched.My femme style has always been its own kind of camouflage: long curls, coral lipstick, and form-fitting dresses. It's not an intentional ruse, but it's always made me blend into hetero-surroundings, protecting my queerness from first glance.Scientists mostly focus on morphing as a means of disguise and evading danger, but there is so much we can't pretend to understand. I watch videos of octopuses strobing colors as they sleep, billowing between pallor, maroon, and indigo. Their transformations appear as unconscious as a mood ring, as pleasurable as blushing, and I wonder what would happen if all our inner lives could be read through our outsides—what stories we might finally be able to tell. Predator is the octopus who captures prey with its deadly embrace, penetrating hard shells with its beaks before it paralyzes and incapacitates with poison. Inquisitive as they may be, octopus are solitary, residing in dens they've built from rocks or shells they've pulled over themselves, rarely known to make physical contact outside of aggression and mating. They've even been witnessed strangling and preying on others of their kind, which scientists call “octopus cannibalism.”Predator is the name I gave to the man more than twice my age. The first man whose eyes hungered for me. Whose spindly fingers split my hymen.Predator, the Three of Them called me when I was seventeen.Years later, Predator is still who I fear I am whenever I look at a woman, pheromones rushing. Prowling gruesome and lonely on the ocean floor. Questions I've never been able to ask those Lost Girls: What were you so afraid of? Why wouldn't you talk to me about it? Do you ever wonder whether, maybe, it's not too late?Queerness is a quandary with infinite answers, but nobody is picking up my calls. Respite. That's what I wanted loving women to be. A dream where we could cure each other's sorrows, create a softer world. Though no one is spared love's devastations, the ruptures of queerness have felt to me more brutal and harder to parse. There are no rules besides the false ones we've internalized. There are no scripts, no well-trod paths to follow. There's only what we are desperately trying to reinvent. Severed arms of an octopus, even those that have been surgically removed, can still reach and grasp. Take me back to the redwood tree, the one with exposed roots wrested free from soil, its tangle of limbs like a cephalopod's tentacles.It's a partial truth to say I loved only my mother. The harder truth is, I loved all my parents. My mother who made me feel heard. My father who taught me to read. My stepmother who taught me that women could go to the sea to write. Together, they made the world complete and enticing. Together, they made me an artist.When I lived in California, I visited that redwood tree constantly, studying its history of knotted arteries, the knob at its center tough and pointed as a nipple. Each time I kissed it. Each time I whispered, Teach me.Teach me to expose my roots and turn my heart inside-out. Teach me to survive my own splitting from soil. No more breaches. Only branches that love in all directions. Undulating to the music like I am made only of nerves and fluid, a starfish pulsating beneath the sea. I've made an ocean out of my living room, a world all to myself. Here, my body crests and flows without thought or fear. As the rhythm changes, something not quite conscious inside me knows exactly how to adapt, how to mold to the music. Here, I feel most myself, as underwater creature, as psychedelic marine radiance, as queer as the ocean will always be. Volta: I travel to visit Marisa in Oregon. We've been friends for many years, holding each other through overwhelm and doling out advice with the inconvenience of three thousand miles between us. But we've never spoken of the advent of our earliest meetings, the way she vanished after she first spent the night. Those five years when we didn't speak at all vibrate in the space between us.On the anniversary of her father's death, we venture to the river, where we strip off our clothing, invent music to grieve and venerate those who have made us who we are. Song rises through Marisa, organic as breath, while I weave cautious harmonies to try to prove my value. The rejection from long ago still stings, caught in my breath.But when we drive home together, I'm surprised when she asks for my forgiveness. I shove it off, convinced apology is no longer necessary. But then she tells me of the inner struggles she has navigated—around her queerness, what she needed versus what she wanted, what she didn't know how to voice.In her story, I hear the stories of so many other friends and lovers whose apologies I may never receive. In her story, I hear my own. The lengths I've traveled to discover the source of my own love, to believe it was never a poison. To invert the source of my pain by forgiving myself for my wounds, by giving and receiving, by riding all the waves. What if love is recursive? What if every love salts the wounds of all lost loves, and if each is an attempt to remedy how we were not loved enough, or not loved right, or abandoned in spite of love? What if each person is a tributary, another chance, forever leading us back to the same wild ocean? X-friends: I did not mean to hurt you. I meant for my love to be a basket of fruits that we'd eat beside the sea, measuring time by the sky. A place where everything we need is already here. This. Our bodies. An island of salt and sky. Where we are sumptuous. Sovereign.X-Friends, I've eaten those fruits. Plunged their ovaries into my throat and swallowed my confusion. Choked on its pit. I've grown into a tree whose fruits I can no longer refuse. Yes, Yes, Yes—Beneath the mind's stories, the world turns simple—Yes—Pleasure taking root—Yes—as I turn to jellied bones, radial yearning—Yes—all sensation and nerve ending—Yes—and I am shape-shifter—Yes—I am pulsing with pigment—Yes—I am— Zenith—a body of pure possibility, its alphabet of longings.This language all our own.