You Keep Me from Falling in Love? by

I will never use or I might just tell you I was wrong. I probably am. Can

Anonymous ousy. It’s not fair, we say. We can’t hold each other back. We have no future together. every date he goes on I feel a pang of jeal-

Imagination itself isn’t enough. Reason cannot save us. The two dance together on a floor of knives, smiling and ignoring. We set each other free. We bleed in silence. We love amidst the dance.

Married at 21, kids on the way, church every morning. I kiss my love and feel his embrace, devoted and smiling. My -im agination takes me on a journey. He comes to me, leaving his family and his community. I am enough for him. I kiss my love and feel his embrace, devoted and smiling.

My imagination takes me on a journey. I pack up my things and go live in Utah with him.

Since his return, the calls grow longer each day, and the unspoken love is a pain in our hearts. Obstacles so great our reason knows to turn around and go home. Obstacles so exciting our imagination is ready to jump. He is in an LDS College in Utah, I am here. He is strongly convicted of his religious ideology, and I hold opposing views on so many topics. He can only date within the church, looking to get married within the next 3 years, whereas I could never abandon my principles and settle down. And yet the yearning grows. Reason alone cannot save us from heartbreak. Yet with every set of lips that hangs on mine I wish they were his, despite having never tasted them. With

Once a week, a response would come in, and my heart would skip a beat. Our exchanges were hopeful. Reason on paper, imagination implied.

Conflicting ideologies and visions about the world, rules and traditions he wanted to follow. A catastrophe of passion, confusion, and frustration.

Troubles emerged that we hadn’t faced as friends.

I didn’t realise I had for him until they were out on the -ta ble, naked and vulnerable and squirming in the sunlight.

What followed were weeks of long conversations about feelings. Feelings he had been taught to suppress, feelings he didn’t have the vocabulary for. Feelings I didn’t know how to pull out of him, and feelings

“That sucks, because I actually really like you. Like, I like you like you.”

“I have to follow God. I have to do right by Him.”

I experienced my first heartbreak. I saw the river, and I gasped for air as I drowned, but his religious conviction was stronger than my pain.

For months we didn’t speak. High school ended and we went our separate ways. A few weeks before his missionary assignment, I reached out. I told him I forgave him, and he saw the errors in his ways. We -start ed to exchange emails, the old fashioned way. On your LDS mission you are allowed laptop time 1 hour per week to email, and all emails pass through the LDS accounts.

Soon after I finished explaining that I wasn’t “gay”, but I liked both girls and boys, he turned silent. The pit in my heart grew -larg er, blinding and painful.

He had obligations within the LDS Church to date. Dating meant to date with intent to marry, However, it also meant dating -some body within the church. When he went on a date with somebody else without telling me, ality was an afterthought and female sexual fluidity was almost a given. Yet with him it was different.

I never expected my first unofficial boyfriend to be a Mormon. When I discovered my own bisexuality, I was a nervous wreck telling my best friend. I knew about his religious convictions, and I didn’t want him to think less of me. Living in a sheltered liberal international community, I hadn’t actually needed to come out to anyone yet. Bisexu-

The trouble of loving an impossibility is that the knowledge of impossibility itself isn’t enough. With relationships, imagination and reason go hand in hand. They need each other, imagination desperately -allow ing reason to do what is right, so that reason can reign in imagination when it runs wild. Love complicates things between the two, muddling the boundaries on where they’re allowed to act, and where they should stay hidden.

We dated in secret. Dating meant holding hands when -no body was looking, tracing our fingertips slowly up one another’s thighs, waiting for a reaction. Exploring one another’s bodies in a way that didn’t cross the carefully mapped out borders of his faith. Everything except everything I wanted to do to him. Placing my hands everywhere but where it mattered. The tension building amidst secret dates before and after school in classrooms and closets, hiding away from the world. Two communities colliding, a wonder of fascination and amazement at the way he saw the world. A sea of intrigue at the way I saw mine. A river, chaotic and turbulent between us, but reckless teenage minds that chose not to see it.