Member-only story
Coming Out and Getting Crushed
Losing my first girlfriend was devastating but also — eventually — empowering
The first thing I learned after Ally broke my heart was to never pour quinoa on a whiskey-soaked laptop. I had been drinking over Skype with my best friend — who was inconveniently a thousand miles away — to try to sort out what had just happened to me when I gestured wildly and knocked over the open bottle of Jack Daniels perched on the floor beside my laptop.
I’d consumed several drinks by then, and my reaction time was way off. My mouth hung open while I watched the whiskey gurgle out of the bottle and spread across my keyboard. By the time I jolted into action several seconds later, it was too late. The screen had permanently gone black, and just like me, it was completely broken.
This was one night after Ally left me. It was two nights after we finally confessed our feelings for one another, two nights after the first time I had ever said “I love you” to another person in a romantic way, and the first time she had ever said it to another girl.
It was 10 weeks after we met and became best friends while working at a Minnesota summer camp — my Minnesota summer camp, the place I’d spent my entire childhood and young adulthood finding myself and the place that, to this day, is home.
