Among the set of people I've fallen in love with over a lifetime, women outnumber men. Perhaps by one hundred to one. I'd never given this too much thought until well-meaning friends suggested that these might be unconscious outgrowths of latent homosexuality.

I didn't as much as protest when I heard this because fortunately sexual desirability or its absence had little effect on these inexplicable attacks of ...not attraction, worship; else it would have shredded my soul into more bits than I could have put together. Some of these women were extremely attractive (by conventional standards) while most weren't. I've always taken it for granted that sex was overrated, an insignificant variable in romantic equations. I've once heard someone say that everybody is bisexual by default. We're all capable of singling out from a glance, sexually advantaged specimens from either gender, aren't we? Anyway, if we use these crooked yardsticks all women would be considered homosexual for we have better taste in women than any man can ever possess or cultivate.

Never had to open my eyes and see them for what they really were, only dreamt. Of childhood pains pleated into shrinking skirts. Because I could catch a failing seam or two between pirouette swirls .Of tears tucked between eyelids that were making stalactite arches around perennially unblinking eyes. Because I could her the drip-drop that everybody else missed in the laughter. Of the trapdoor under thickly carpeted conversations. Because I kept falling through.
Nothing beats the pleasure of creating alters for people who have no intention of painting themselves in enigmatic hues. Especially for unimaginative women who’ll never understand how beautiful their silhouettes are or realize that shadows shouldn’t go unnoticed just because the glare of a torch is unflattering to the image itself.
I fall in love with women the way I want to be fallen in love with. The only person who would love her the way she ought to be loved lives in me. And I pay homage in part to the lover I might have made of my male self and in part to the woman who brings him into existence. With lips pursed into secret pouches bursting with unspoken sentences and choked silences. With upended glances that might have betrayed more than a quizzical “just looking” expression if they had been allowed to stand upright and meet another pair of eyes headlong. With every moment swallowed back into a parched throat along with the utterance “I see you as clearly as I’ve seen myself and what’s more, I see myself better than ever for having seen you.”
It is my self that I’ve been falling in love with, the woman and man within. Over and over again. More than I’ve ever . Hundred times to one.