I spotted her four rows behind me on the plane to London: tousled hair in a wool beanie, giant backpack, leather boots of a kind worn only by lesbians and Dickensian orphans. I turned my head to the angle most visible to her and rolled my shirt cuffs up to bare a few inches of forearm tattoos, dangling my hand, with its short unvarnished nails, into the aisle.

Like most femmes, I am an expert at signaling my queerness through physical clues legible only to other queers. I can communicate my sexual identity through the set of my shoulders, if need be. So much of heterosexual attraction requires the minimization and infantilization of the female body: crossed legs, tilted heads, widened eyes, slackened mouths. A disregard for this affect suggests that a woman’s desires lie elsewhere.

So I sat in the cramped airplane seat with my legs comfortably spread, my elbows on both armrests, exuding a physical entitlement to the space I occupied. The stranger rose from her seat and made her way to the bathroom. As she passed me, I responded like an animal prompted by instinct. My body felt heavy and hot, glowing with a wavelength visible only to the object of my attention. My pulse was chugging in every fingertip, as if I’d been made radioactive by desire. I do not understand this chemical process, but I knew that, once it was triggered, the end result was usually sex.

It must seem arrogant of me to assume that my airplane crush reciprocated my attention, but trust me that when you’ve been performing this choreography for more than 20 years, you know when your partner feels the music and when she doesn’t. The first decade was spent being humiliatingly mistaken a good portion of the time while I calibrated my radar, but in recent years it hadn’t led me astray. The thrill, of course, still resided in the slender possibility that this time, this time, I might be wrong.

This secret language of seduction had defined my life since I was 15 and in my first relationship. I was a serial monogamist, the ends of many of my affairs overlapping slightly with the beginnings of the ones that followed, forming a daisy chain of romances. When I became unhappy in love, I changed my partner. There were a few brief periods of singleness, but I was never alone, really. There were always new flirtations. A string of dates. A lover from my past ready to step into the present. After a few weeks or months, I would find my next forever.

Once I reached my 30s, I started having moments of unease when I contemplated this pattern. I made a promise to myself: I would be celibate for a while, abstaining not only from sex but from flirting, kissing or forming any kind of romantic connection.