O brave new world! That has such women in it!

So yesterday I had a pseudo-date with a girl. Which is news for me because I spent most of my life assuming I was straight. Backstory? Backstory.

I missed the preteen slumber parties where girls would practice kissing. I missed the drunken makeouts with freshman year roommates. I missed the "whose boobs are bigger'' groping tests. I missed out on all the stereotypical homoerotic happenings girls like to bond over. And let me tell you, I am really regretting that now. Scantily-clad pillow fights?

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Add that to my to-do list.

No, in middle school I hung out with boys who ran around the woods and chased me with snakes. In high school I was that gangly awkward girl who greeted socialization with a death glare. In freshman year I made the mistake of getting a boyfriend. Ugh. How was I supposed to figure out who I thought was hotter if the past 10 years of my life I was pretty much exclusively surrounded by cock?

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Most of the time I'd find a girl reaaally attractive and brush it off, because once upon a time some moron told me that all girls go through a lesbian phase. So clearly I was just in that phase. When I was 14. And then when I was 16. And when I was 17, 18, 19, and now at 20 I've figured it out.

If it keeps popping up, children, it's not a phase.

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It didn't help that I didn't start thinking about it until college anyway, where my friends would come up to me and state, "I kissed the girl from my Intro to Econ class at a party last night I was WASTED." I'd get slightly jealous and mention casually to my then-boyfriend, "So... would you be mad if I hooked up with a girl?" Of course, the White Heterosexual Male response? "Not if I get to watch."

Unhelpful.

Yet life went on and I developed small crushes on my straight female friends. But I didn't realize they were real crushes. I thought they were those elusive "girl crushes" on that girl you admire for whatever reason in a completely heterosexual friendly way. So again, brushed them off. And besides, I was in a relationship with a guy - it didn't exactly matter what I thought of anyone else because I wasn't in a position to figure it out.

Then a magical thing happened. I dumped the boyfriend and I hopped on a plane to England for study abroad. One girl on the program changed my experience forever. A beautiful, witty, intelligent girl, perfectly put together every single day. We frolicked through the wilds of East Anglia together, sang showtunes, discussed our future weddings, and then returned to a flat kitchen for tea. She was exactly what I had been missing my whole life.

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She was the LGBTQ Mary Poppins, a straight girl with a lot of bisexual and lesbian friends, who had heard everything I said a zillion times before. She had the tendency to point basic things out a hundred times. "Maria, you have told me you're sitting next to a girl and want to jump her bones. You're not making it up!" And when I returned after a night out, positively smitten with a girl I had met, she pushed me to message her for a coffee date. And when I returned after that, she assured me that I didn't scare the everloving shit out of the sweet reserved English girl with my blunt American "Hi I'm coming to terms with my sexuality let's discuss this and E.M. Forster book covers and the use of smileys over reasonably-priced uni beverages!"

Now as I near the end of my study abroad experience, the time where nothing really counts for real life, I think of all the beautiful girls I could've seduced and I wonder, "Why the hell didn't I figure this out sooner?"