61 online quizzes and 16 confused years later,
I finally settle for my bisexuality,
and I do not know whether to prepare myself for being called a closeted dyke,
or an attention seeking liar,
for the common saying goes,
there are three types of people in the world,
‘gay, straight and lying’,
and I do not know enough to refute
but I know enough to disagree,
so I have settled for this little cusp of discomfort,
and
this confusion is the most familiar part of the day.

Here, bisexuality is more like
bye sexuality
like gay, but not gay enough,
like double the options (or so you think)
but eight times the panic.
Imagine coming out, and your life turns into a math class,
‘so you like girls and boys but how much?
40-60?
70-30?
50-50?’
“I have given zero thought to this”
‘so why is it bi sexual when there are more than two genders?’
“because it was never two categories,
but two ends,
of a spectrum,
and a hundred identities in between and outside,
and a thousand people who couldn’t see it that way”.

Some days, it sounds like the
best of both worlds,
but none of them trusts you completely,
on most days,
it’s like two roads diverged in a wood,
and somehow I’m on both,
but it doesn’t matter,
because either way they’ll call you lost,
because the bisexuality checklist involves,
dating a person of every gender,
sleeping with a person of every gender,
getting your heart broken (14 times, atleast)
achieving thermodynamic equilibrium,
taking a photo of the black hole,
impeaching a fascist government,
and still having to come out four times a day;
the straight people checklist involves
being born.

It’s so easy to not talk about this,
because, apparently, it’s easier to get away with this,
at least my mom has a sliver of hope,
that in the end, I will settle for a boy,
its so easy to erase this name, when in the end,
on both sides there are songs that will fit your narrative
but they never intended it to be that way.
so now, I’m trying to write the poems, I’d wish I’d heard before,
about boys, and their soft boy jaws, and how kissing them, sometimes tastes like caramel custard,
and also girls, and their stealthy shoulders, how still you have to hold, to actually hear their heartbeat sync with yours,
and even though I haven’t done either,
yet I know both to be true,
for me,
because sex is just a part of bisexuality,
like holding hands and buying flowers and not knowing what to do
but doing it anyway,
because this identity isn’t less
or more
or somewhere in the middle,
it isn’t half and half
my bisexuality isn’t a waiting point on the highway to being 100% legitimised gay,
it is its own town, its own party.
I do not have to tell you,
this love is love and all that shit,
I’m trying to tell you,
backhanded biphobia is still biphobia,
and that every time I commit,
it is never a revolution, never choosing a side, a gender,
it’s always a person,
just a person.