Once, a few years ago, someone asked me in the comment section on Instagram if I was queer. I was taken aback – I had never considered this word as something mine to claim. I answered honestly: I had never considered that, but yes, I guess I am.

I like women. Their lipstick mouths. Laundry day softness. Hidden sharp things. They smell so good, move like liquid, open at the hinges to let light in and dark out all at once. I'm not evolved in my desire for them – hips do to me what they do to teenage boys. Lips glaze my brain over. My memories of them are vignettes of soapy shampoo, jangled bracelets, liquid eyeliner and that unnameable mystery, beneath them.

Queerness is not something I feel I belong in. It feels like a party I've been invited to out of politeness. Invited, but not really. While lights glisten and sway in a warm wind, legs shimmer in glorious dresses and purple leather. Gender transforms and morphs into a big, summer sky of dazzling variations – and here I am, standing on the outside. Sipping a drink, next to the dark green shadow of some back corner bush. Hoping no-one will question my presence. Eyes on my feet, feeling not quite enough of whatever it is I need to be to slink into it.

After reading books and essays and posts on queerness, I feel much like a baby deer. Knobbly kneed and embarrassingly un-coordinated in this space. While my desire says I belong, the cultural demand to know the complicated nuance of such a layered, loaded world – has me stuttering. Like the big sister of a childhood best friend, I stare up, completely intimidated. I watch queerness lean in the mirror and smack its lips. Big, looming, confident and above all, dazzling in tones of complexity.

If I Google search the word queer, Oxford's definition tells me that 'queerness is the quality or characteristic of having a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms'. According to that definition, I am by all intents and purposes, queer. But taking the first listing of Google's search at face value is like trusting ridiculously pretty men. Heartbreak exists in that kind of stupidity. So I'm Wikipedia queer, but that doesn’t mean much.

In my hand I have an invitation to a world I should belong it, but feel I don't. The muffled sounds of people riding the wind over my garden fence. The buzz of belonging warbled by distance, the complication of modern love and this highway fast culture. I know I belong, but do I really? If I am to be a woman, just a woman, will my invitation really be an invitation? Like the big sister metaphor, queerness is not rejecting me; I've just not figured out how to talk to it. How to reach out. Knock on its door. Ask it if I can sit on its floor.

Maybe, one cherry warm afternoon, I'll sit and watch queerness flick through pages of its favourite magazine. Maybe I'll cough. Work up the nerve. Ask it if I can love this man I love and still wear the word. Ask it if that's really my name written on the invitation. Ask it to look at me. Ask it if I belong. Ask it if I can wear it my own way. And maybe, like a dream girl fever film, I'll hear myself answer in the mirror.

Honey, yes.