This is not my usual, intimate kind of story.
People from my hometown tend to get married young. It has always baffled me, but maybe that’s because I just never really thought of myself as somebody who would get married. From the time of my high school graduation to my college graduation, over half of the girls from my high school had new last names and gilded left hands. One of them was my ex, Jillian.
Jillian got married at 22 to her college sweetheart, Mike. And although I didn’t admit it at the time, I was absolutely in love with her. We had started seeing each other during high school, our parents blissfully unaware of went on behind closed doors during sleepovers. What had originated as two girls having fun and exploring with each other turned into an addiction; we were absolutely obsessed with each other. From the ages of 14 to 18, I rarely went to bed without having spoken to her or held her at least once that day. We were each other’s first everything: our first kiss, our first love. But the small town atmosphere didn’t exactly lend itself to sexual orientations outside of one end of the Kinsey scale, so it was our little secret.