When I met her, I didn’t know what she meant to me. When I made love to her for the first and last time, I didn’t know what she meant to me. And now, years later, I am still none the wiser.

She is the one that never quite got away. I had her, but didn’t. I was in a relationship with her, but wasn’t. I am not in a relationship with her now, but I am.

Her name means Truth.

I don’t know why, but that absurdly makes me one hundred percent certain that she is meant to be in my life. I just don’t know why, or where she fits in.

I don’t know if I am gay or straight or somewhere in between. I am not used to falling in love with women. I fall in love with men far too easily. I find it easy to be attractive to men – I know what they want, I know how to tease and I like doing it, I love their strength and I love pushing into it with my own, whether in bed or in conversation.

Don’t get me wrong – I find women attractive all the time. But I have no idea how to be attractive to them. And of the two women I’ve ever fallen for, I have only told one. The other, I think I just love – out of respect and awe and inspiration.

But this girl. I don’t know what it is. She teases me like I tease men, and she knows just what to do to make me want her. Pulling, tugging, grabbing and then, at the last moment, letting go. Stop. Start over. And repeat. She does it by kissing me – months apart and when I’m least expecting it. At a dying man’s house. Or in a bathroom, at a café we often visit. The last time, she had just given me a present and then she gave me this. “Best. Present. Ever.” I whisper in between kisses, and she smiles against my mouth.

Neither of us are good at being single, so ironically we never have been. But we’ve been together all the same. Together, but not. It’s always something with her – but never everything. I let her go once, but she cheated and slipped a little bit of herself into my coffee or something. Because I’ve never quite been able to get her out of my system ever since.

She was with me when I got my tattoo. “Verité” – ‘Truth’ in French, and a variation of her name. I had wanted to get it anyway, so it was just a coincidence. I tell myself.

In silly moments, when we’re upset with our partners, we dream about a life together. “If I had to pick one person in my life that I think I could make it work with, it would be you”. She said that a month after she met me and she still says it today. She looks straight in my eyes and tells me she means it. I can see it happening too, to be honest. We would barely fight, we’d listen to jazz on Sundays, I would breathe in her glorious hair at night, we would both be mothers and raise each other’s children as our own, we would hold hands and kiss in public and people would try not to look, she would sit beside me as I told my parents and we would deal with the consequences together.

It’s a nice picture. We have sillier dreams, like running away together to Spain or Greece and opening a shop that sells home made bread and goat cheese. Those are more fun, appealing to our affinity for the quaintly glamorous – but, in the end, harder to imagine actually coming true. But the other dream? Yeah. I can picture that.

Then again it’s easier to dream when you have a different reality. Maybe this is all it will ever be. Maybe once or twice a year she’ll kiss me in that way of hers and we’ll look over the table at each other with knowing eyes and then walk away from each other.

Until the next moment of Truth.