I had thought that the best option was to erase that first kiss. All I could think about was what a disappointment it would be for my family. Besides, I felt strange: as if something was wrong with me and made me different from the others. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind: I had kissed another woman.

I felt that it wasn't right, that there was something wrong with me or that maybe I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't tell my family about what I was feeling, let alone what I had done. But... I had an inherent need to do it again because I had felt that right at that moment it was the only thing I wanted, that there was nothing wrong with me and that it managed to move every fibre of my body.

But it wasn't like that, the only thing I did was to fill myself with reasons to think that I was the bad guy, that I was on the wrong path and that I would be a disappointment to everyone. A few days after that first kiss with her, the woman I had always liked, I met a relative of my sister's boyfriend. And without a moment's hesitation, like an impulse, I threw myself at him, trying to erase what I had felt and done until then. "You like men, you like men", I kept repeating to myself over and over again as I erased all traces of the past.

Growing up in a family where religion and machismo were in the way did not let me see what I had done until then, feeling alienated from my body, feeling that everything I thought or felt was wrong and that somehow everything I wanted was not from someone normal. So I was with a lot of men, trying to clarify who I was, forcing myself to live what I had been taught was good and moving further and further away from what I felt. I got to be with people I didn't want just to change my mind, kissing and touching bodies I didn't want and feeling dirty for using them to my advantage.

"You like men, you like men, you like men," she kept repeating over and over again as she erased all traces of the past.

Years later, when I entered university the world stopped. And as if the windows of my essence suddenly opened, everything came out like a piano melody. The people I met told me about their tastes, their thoughts and their looks. I no longer felt alone. I didn't feel different for feeling what I had always repressed, nor did I feel bad seeing two girls walking down the street holding hands or two boys kissing in the middle of an afternoon, showing the love I hadn't had for years.

From that moment on I understood that it was not me who was wrong, that I had allowed all those thoughts to interfere with the people who touched me, they looked at me or came into my life. But no, it wasn't supposed to be like that. I was no longer to say that the first kiss was with a boy my family adored, but with the girl I had liked at school. I was no longer to feel alien in my own body, but that I could love being in it without fear of disappointing others, for when I could understand that the resistance I had had against myself up to that moment was the same resistance I should have against others. For finally no one could live my life, I could love as freely as I did and I could tell the world, without fear or embarrassment, that I like and love a woman.

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Written by: María Ximena Cortés Melo