She was an exquisite kind of fine. The kind of beautiful that makes you look and never break your stare. You wouldn’t care who was watching. But it wasn’t her features that grabbed my attention as I stared at her across the overfilled train. It was the small gold hamsa that hung daintily from her wrist. It initiated our conversation. And me asking for her accompaniment to my favorite restaurant in the West Village on 8^th Ave. And her saying yes while she blushed beneath her perfectly applied make up. Mac. I could tell. It ended with me asking for her number, and her writing the combination of digits on a piece of bright yellow, unlined paper with a baby pink pen in blue ink. She purposely held my hand a little longer than she needed to. I didn’t mind at all.

After our fated encounter, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was it. Everything that I felt like I was missing. And not because I had some repressed fantasy to be with someone that was just like me. Not because I was bi-curious and was using this as an opportunity to find out how it really was to be with one of the same. I had been with many like me before, and many different than me as well. But she had a shyness that rendered her seemingly defenseless. And a ferocity that threatened to swallow me whole if I wasn’t careful.

And consume me she did. After our date to the dimly lit restaurant in the city. After the movie in Queens. After shopping and dinner in Long Island and late night personal sessions in Brooklyn. Those were my favorite. Her always wearing her Hello Kitty boy shorts. Her perfect mix of innocence and enticement. The epitome of her. The embodiment of everything that was so necessary for me during that time and in that space.

But as much as I loved my one in the same, I was that much ashamed of her. Not wanting her to hold my hand in public. Failing to reciprocate her perfectly placed, affectionate kisses in front of our friends. They all were aware. But I was too reluctant to demonstrate what they already knew. I was not her same lover, her same friend, her same partner when her four walls weren’t surrounding us. I cowered in fear when we weren’t protected by the privacy of closed doors and pulled blinds.

Eventually she grew tired of me. Her exceptional kind of fine turned into something I didn’t know how to handle. Into ignored phone calls. Into being stood up. Into boring days and excruciatingly lonely nights. Into a feeling I didn’t think could come from one of the same. Feelings I had reserved for those that were different. But relationships are not so different when the two people involved share the same softness. The same desires. The same vulnerabilities. The same hopes that it wouldn’t end as it always did this time.

She needed me to be different. She needed something constant. Something invariable. A person that was unchanging when she woke up cuddled against them in the morning and when she fell asleep in their arms at night. That would prove to her that not everyone was out to cause her anguish. She needed confirmation. The exception. Her salvation. But I disappointed her. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Because when she needed me to be different, I was more of the same.