Wall Flowers and Door Mats

In my awkward chubby youth, I was painfully aware of each occasion I was Odd Man Out: Sitting alongside my girlfriend at a screening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, while she and her boyfriend chewed on each other’s retainers. Or at a food court, me inordinately focused on my onion rings as another friend fed her date from a plastic fork. The brutal bus rides and bike rides home. Every afternoon around 2:45, the kids from Parkdale Collegiate walk past my office window and my heart breaks for all those third wheels in this post-pubescent Tour de France.

     “Morrissey is asexual” I reminded Rich.
     “Oh, sure he is.” Such a cynic, he didn’t even look up from his paper.
     “And Stephen Fry…”
     “Not anymore.”
     Before Rich, I experienced a variation of the same gamut most people run in their search for true love: The Possessive and Crazy First. The Disinterested Rebound. The Starter Fiancé. The Clock-Stoppingly-Ugly-Brain Fling. Plus all those that fizzled out at the imagination stage. I’d have become a much better artist had I been asexual. What I could have accomplished in my youth if half of it hadn’t been wasted agonizing over some doofus.