Prompt for today’s Julance theme.
This is based on my own experiences, so once again using Lance as my outlet (I love my fellow bi disaster). It’s also a tinnnny bit Klance. As ever.
Always remember to be who you are, love in your way and never settle for boxes of other people’s making. Be proud of who you are.
Hope you enjoy reading!
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Julance day 25: Bisexual
His flag is cape, the colours a pastel train amidst the flare and buoyancy of the afternoon. He secures the knot, knows the material is cheap and easily replaced, but it’s his bi flag. The first one he’s ever bought, the first one he’s ever owned.
The first outward symbol of a feeling without name, without substance or understanding for so many years.
Lance remembers as he walks. Remembers that tangible moment at sixteen. Just seeing the boy across the room and feeling that spike; the rush and pulse of instant attraction in the depths of his stomach, hands shaking, eyes roving and mind instantly shattering from what he’d thought before that very second.
The moment when he questioned the roles and boxes he’d placed himself in, been told were all he could be.
Lance remembers the first kiss. So different and shy, the touches to jaws and fingertips different and yet...similar. Same vital flashes of feeling, same giggles between kisses, same conversation and whispered sentiments.
But also the need to hide. Only a few friends knew of his first boyfriend. While other couples who fitted into acceptable standards walked home together and kissed in broad daylight, his first love bloomed in shadow. In stolen kisses early when they got to school, in parties surrounded by friends where they could sit in one anothers laps, in clubs secluded as safe spaces.
He remembers the taunts. Words yelled across the room by classmates, sneers and looks of disgust. Things that made him want to hide, want to question emotions, wonder why this was the price he had to pay for love.
And then of course, followed the assumptions.
‘It’s just a phase,’ or ‘everyone experiments’ and ‘are you sure you’re not in denial?’
For the world has boxes and everyone must fit in them. Lance had always been attracted to women, so this must be an anomaly, a testing in teenagehood. Or perhaps the denial had been up until now, that by having a boyfriend he must be gay, there was no inbetween.
As if life is ever so simple. As if we don’t all exist in shades of grey.
But it was hard, when that first love faded as it often does, not to give into those burdens of belief by those around him. So he locked it up. Dismissed it just as they did, pretended it didn’t happen. Denied it, didn’t admit his first real relationship was with a man, buried the confusion under heaps of statements and affirmations in his head.
He ignored the glimmer of feelings when they arose, tiny embers trying to fight for oxygen under layer upon layer of suffocation. Time and time again he wrapped himself up in rhetoric, in disbelief and mantras until-
Until it breaks free.
A flicker of violet eyes. A hint of smile. A shock of dark hair.
Conversations late at night, connections and teasing, those wings in his stomach, the fizz of anticipation when he walks into a room, the missing and the wishing. The falling, headfirst, before Lance has even realised what he’s done and what is happening.
Falling for a man. And this time, he is older, he is stronger and he just knows.
This is not infatuation. This is not a phase, this is not a testing of boundaries.
This is his reality. This is who he is.
So he grips his bi flag, covers himself in pink, purple and blue, and stands tall as he arrives for his first Pride. And Lance laughs as he sees them, the crowd that mirror him in his colours; his kin who struggle and have come to a similar realisation in their own time and place.
Love in all shades and colours surrounds him. And grabbing onto the edges of his flag, he races to join in.
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