by Ren S.

Created on: August 10, 2008   Last Updated: January 19, 2009

Developing feelings for someone who is heterosexual seems to be rather common among GLBT+ individuals. Still, I never thought it would happen to me. Usually, learning that someone is "straight" has the same effect on me as learning that she is married or in a serious relationship-it's almost an instant turnoff. This is not because she's heterosexual, mind you. On the contrary, to borrow a cliche, some of my best friends are straight! (In reality, almost all of my friends are heterosexual-and, still, I'd never been romantically interested in any of the female ones.) There's just something about knowing that you cannot be with someone.

I keep thinking about what happened because I still don't understand it or know exactly how to put it into words. I simply reported to work for the first day of an internship. She was the third person I met and was, of all people, one of my supervisors. I didn't really think much of her at first, just that she didn't seem all that intimidating as my other supervisor did. But probably as soon as by the end of that first day of work, I had a really good feeling about her that wasn't necessarily romantic in its nature. That feeling, whatever it was, escalated when, during my first week on the job I learned that she had plans to leave her position at my internship site in a few weeks. The only way I know how to describe the feeling was that, in that moment, I felt as if I knew her completely because we were the same person. She didn't have to explain anything-and trying to explain it to most people would be a really involved task and they still wouldn't understand-but I understood exactly why she wanted to leave.

And from then on out, even though I discovered many differences between the two of us, it just always felt as if we were in sync. When I was with her, I knew that I was with someone who understood me, and I believed that she felt the same about me. It sounds so silly, but we really could-and did-finish each other's sentences. I would go to her office intending to stay for five minutes and, before I knew it, an hour had gone by. There were days when she worked right around the corner from me and I never saw her, but I felt happy just knowing she was there. On days when she wasn't at work, it just felt like something was missing. I kept thinking how awful I would feel when she finally left, but she never did leave. That allowed us to get even closer and build the friendship we have today.

As my internship was coming to an end,

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