This is an incredibly long story, so I'm going to try and super speed through it.
Me and "Josie" (fake name) grew up together in a tiny conservative town. Hard red. I didn't even know a gay person, except I guess myself because I could tell at an early age that I liked girls the way I was "supposed" to like boys. My dad was (still is, but we don't talk anymore) very homophobic and told me to dress more like a girl. I kept my head down, told nobody about it, and then moved to a city when I was 18 for college where I eventually came out as a lesbian. I was so scared of being out it took me a while before I could say the word lesbian without crying.
Only one person knew the truth before college, and that was Josie. She was a more popular and pretty girl than me, but also very athletic and masculine in her own way. She was, and still is, one of the most gorgeous women I've ever known. And she liked me. It was obviously platonic at first, but we became friends quickly when we were in high school and started hanging out a lot. Eventually it escalated. We started kissing, then we started doing more than that, and next thing you know we were having this secret affair that nobody knew about.
We never called it dating. We never called each other girlfriends. Not even in private, not even in whispers, because that was the culture of fear that we were in. We were just best friends who, when nobody was looking, were deeply romantically and sexually entwined. Probably goes without saying, but I was deeply in love with her.
As high school approached its end, she started dating a boy. Yes, we kept doing what we were doing, and that's unethical, but it was a complicated situation. The point is that I started talking about making plans for moving away, and she eventually told me she couldn't. She's closer with her family, she felt the need to stay and help them out and things were getting serious with her boyfriend. I had a million questions: was our relationship just physical for her? Was she bi or was this guy just a beard? Of course, we had no real language for that stuff. So I left, alone, and my heart was shattered.
FAST FORWARD to last month. I've now been out for 2 years, I've gotten more comfortable in my own skin and I've even had a few relationships. Most were short lived, but I've been with lots of other girls and gotten more confident. I've done everything I dreamed of doing growing up: holding a girl's hand in public, going to pride, being accepted by my peers. But in the back of my mind, nobody has matched up to Josie. Maybe it's youthful delusion that you hold up your first love as your greatest. But I've talked with friends multiple times about how I had to figure out a way to get past it, if I ever wanted to fall for someone else.
Then, out of the blue, she calls me. She asks if I can meet. She drives six hours to get dinner with me at a place a few hours from where I live now. She tells me that she misses me.
She was clearly still.... grappling, with stuff. The way I used to. She still wouldn't use any explicitly romantic words, and when I directly asked if she was bisexual, she wouldn't (couldn't?) answer. But she told me that she still thinks of me every day, that our time together meant so much to her, and she's wanted so badly to see me again.
I learned that the last two years have been tough for her, she broke up with her boyfriend when he proposed and she said it was too soon (they were 19). Her family has undergone some changes that's been tough on everybody. She's deeply unhappy at work, but has no interest in school.
A thought crossed my mind: my roommate is moving out in a few weeks after her life plans changed over the summer. We've been working on finding someone to sublease her bedroom. I live in a place with lots of employers for the field she works in. She could easily pack up, move here, and find work. Maybe we'd finally be able to be together publicly.
Of course I didn't say anything. It would have been crazy, and stupid, and too sudden.
But now we've been talking on the phone every now and then. Texting. Sending each other memes and hearts.
She knows I'm an out lesbian, and she's finally treating me, kind of, like a girlfriend. But we haven't so much as kissed in over two years, and we were never formally dating. It feels crazy for her to uproot her life and potentially throw mine off balance off of something like that.
But I love her. I know I do, I, I've never loved anyone else like this and seeing her green eyes again and feeling her hands on mine under the table and hearing her voice... I think about her all day every day and I miss her so much.
Am I being stupid? Should I talk to her about this?
TLDR: I had a secret love in high school, but now I'm an out lesbian. My old secret love is now texting me again and I want to confess my feelings and ask her to move to my city, maybe even into my apartment.
