Was He in Love with Me, or the Character I Invented?

The Problem with Being Two Women at Once

The man came into my life with an entrance as grand and doomed as Napoleon’s on the battlefield at Waterloo. I swear I heard Al Green's Love and Happiness play in the background. The irony is not lost on me. As it turned out later, like Napoleon, he was a short, wannabe king with a child-like temper. But first, he took me to Mexico. There, like on the book jacket of a 90s romance novel, humidity curled my hair, we made love between sandy sheets, and life added to the score: every love song seemed to have been written about this moment. After another sun-kissed day, I buried my face in his sweat-gleaming skin. His arms wrapped around me tightly. 

"Who have I been making love to, you or Lara?" he whispered.

The record scratched.

"How could you ask me that," I whispered, stunned. In my mind, blood dripped from my heart onto the white bedding. But in his defense, how could he know what it felt like to be Lara to the world and, in his arms, to want to be me?

I had created the character of Lara a few years prior and started to chronicle her erotic escapades through horny haikus online. Quickly after I started publishing, my writing gathered a solid following, but since I used an alter ego, a pen name, none of my readers knew who I was. All they knew was Lara. Lusting Lara. Sensual Lara. Hedonistic Lara. That in itself wasn't an issue; I had created Lara on purpose to give myself permission to live a part of me that I hadn't fully understood before—my sexuality. What I did have an issue with was her being in bed with me when I finally wanted to be seen for who I was. 

Rita Hayworth, an American actress famous for playing Gilda in the 1940s, once said, "Men go to bed with Gilda but wake up with me." Gilda made Rita a star, and the world’s inability to separate her from that character haunted her private life. She got married five times. That day in Mexico, I understood Rita's sentiment like never before. His questioning hurt me and deepened my growing resentment toward the character who had once saved my life. 

Lara had come to me in a time of need. I had just left a relationship that had lasted my entire adult life until that point, and I found myself devastatingly heartbroken and devastatingly horny. Being a writer, my desire first manifested itself on the page. As my body was experiencing a deep-seated longing to be intimate, erotic fantasy after erotic fantasy came pouring out of me. 

For a long time, I didn't see myself as the protagonist in my own sexual experiences. In the early 2000s, when I was growing up, teen magazines for girls would still write articles headlined "10 Ways To Make Him Come" but not "10 Ways To Get You Off." Our culture and mainstream porn teach women to be objects of desire,  but the stories I wrote were about me. I was no longer the object of someone else's desire; I had found my desire within. The part I unearthed I called Lara. She was unafraid. She was free of shame. She didn't care about what other people thought of her. The more I spent time with her on the page, the more I could embrace my inner Lara when I was away from my desk. But I wasn't prepared to be mistaken for her by the man I loved. 

In Mexico, I realized that as much as I wanted to be seen for who I truly was, I couldn't deny that Lara was also part of me. She wasn't a mask but a reflection of my desires and a way to explore parts of myself I’d kept hidden. We get to rewrite the stories that we were told about ourselves. Through writing her stories, I found a way back to myself,  realizing that I didn't have to choose between being Lara and being me — I could be both.