I. In which he finds himself alienated with discussions of relationship and sexuality at a young age.
The first thing I remember about the bed was how soft it was. It was soft like my mother’s overcooked oatmeal: pasty, amorphous and improbably lumpy. It didn’t support my 12 year old body weight so much as it surrounded and enveloped it, giving way to it until my torso and limbs could sense themselves resting on the hard particleboard supporting what was supposed to be the mattress. Not that it mattered much that night. Sleep was chased away by the raucous voices of the other boys in the room, too excited and hopped up on hormones to notice themselves sinking into their own oatmeal beds.
“Yeah, I think the she’s pretty,” said one of them, a grudging admission that wasn’t really a grudging admission. “I like her red lips. They’re hot.”
“So you’re saying you’re going for her?” asked another. He enunciated his words with a distinctly sharp assertiveness. The r sounds slid out of his throat with a predatory edge.
“Yeah, yeah…” he replied coolly, with a distinct, playful European lilt in his voice. “Yeah…I’d go out with her.”
Everyone in the cabin swooned in waves that washed over my bunk space, followed by a round of raucous laughter, and congratulatory cheers. I felt myself caught up in the flow, and let out a “OooOOOooh…” and added to the laughter.
What was I doing? What was going on?
“Okay,” said someone below me, in a throaty, deep voice that almost sounded baritone. “Who’s next?”
From a bunk shrouded in the night’s darkness, out of reach of the European’s flash light, someone else from the class — the school’s famed sports superstar — called out another girl’s name. It evoked the image of a tall, lanky feminine form, wavy blonde hair crowning their long face, punctuated with a silver-braced smile.
“Yeah, Silver…” said Sharp. “Okay, Baritone, you’re next.”
“Hmm…who’s already taken?”
And so, in the darkness of our cabin, the boys of my combined Grade 4, 5 and 6 class strategically carved up the group of girls who were our classmates like ancient generals at a table dividing up a fallen kingdom: Deciding who would get what territory. Deciding who would get whom. And in deciding who would stake their claim, qualifiers had to be created and discussed. Who had the nicest chest? The hottest lips? The most beautiful and sexiest body, legs, face and hair? The girls lost their names, their descriptors reducing them to the only feminine body parts of value to a bunch of charged-up 12 year old boys on a school camp trip.
“Superstar’s taken Ms. Busty, and the European’s taken Ms. Red Lips.” Announced Sharp. “I’m taking the Brunette. So who are you going for?”
More swooning. More “Ooohs” forced out of my mouth, more faked laughter. I could feel disgust and shame starting to congeal and coagulate in my head. Lumps in the oatmeal. Decades before the language of ‘wokeness’, queerness, feminism, or social justice started to stir and stir the porridge of my brain, something I couldn’t form into words was telling me this conversation wasn’t right. Like maybe my mother had used expired milk to boil the oats. Or maybe I’d mistaken the salt for sugar.
The soft, lumpy bed. Oatmeal. The word “oatmeal” took on the flavour of the conversation. Oatmeal was talking about who was the hottest girl in the class, or which girl had the biggest breasts: bland. And the more and more I say the word aloud, the more and more alien this conversation becomes to me.
The pull of youthful sexual wanting had brought my classmates to a sugar rush of fever-dream fantasy dates, while I was crashing on an acrid bitterness spreading through my body.
“Justin? Justin! Hey, EARTH TO JUSTIN,” screams Sharp from below me. I can hear his teeth being bared.
Something else takes over at this point. I would later learn that this is a situation when the amygdala kicks in, throwing a switch, doing a frenzied fight-or-flight end-run around my executive brain functions in a panicked effort to survive.
And right now there is nothing more dangerous to my survival than a failure to fit in with a group of boys flirting with hypermasculinity and hypersexuality.
II. In which he realizes his attractions are not conventionally normative.
Mr. M’s unassuming figure always seemed to be dwarfed by the classrooms he’d walk into. But something imperceptible in me could sense his spirit filling the space left empty by his aged, hunched-over body, radiating a powerful force around him.
It never ceased to command people’s attention; when he entered a room, everyone turned their heads to face him. When he spoke, everyone hushed their voices to listen. When his classes ended, there were always those who stayed behind to be with him, even if they didn’t have a reason to remain.
People were just attracted to him, even when his improbably difficult redox reaction quiz questions left almost everyone repulsed, like ions of the same charge.
I was one of those people drawn into his orbit, my attention thoroughly captured like a Chlorine atom grabbing electrons to itself.
Genuinely puzzled by one of his devastating quizzes, I joined the cloud of electrons circling Mr. M at his lab bench at the front of the class. Straining to hear other questions from my classmates, and the answers he gave in response, I found myself reading his lips. I studied his lips intensely, trying to parse the enigmatic solutions that would no doubt be my salvation on the upcoming mid-term exam.
And that’s when I started to notice his the skin on his lips, the spiderweb pattern of dried and chapped skin criss-crossing its dark pink softness.
I imagine what it would be like to feel those lips pressed to mine. I imagined how his breath would taste on my tongue. I imagine us embracing each other. A tingle starts to ripple down my neck, down to the base of my spine, catching my breath mid-sentence in my throat.
III. In which he starts to realize his (a)sexuality is not what he thought it was.
“You’re definitely not asexual,” my lover said to me.
“Yup!” I shouted out loud in wild agreement. “I’m not asexual!” I screamed out the words to the universe from their bed, loud enough so it could not be ignored by the spirits inside their room, and yet not so loud that it would disturb their neighbours. Though truthfully, they were likely already disturbed enough.
I said it over and over to myself over the coming days and weeks as we’d see each other. That asexuality wasn’t part of the narrative I was trying to put together, to explain why my relationships had developed the way they had: to explain why my attraction had consistently focused so narrowly on my closest, best, and most trusted friends. Why a relationship that superficially appeared to be stable ended up evaporating into codependence, loneliness, and my infidelity.
I denied that being on the asexual spectrum fit with the puzzle I was trying to rebuild for myself. I tried fitting other pieces, but it didn’t matter how hard I tried to force them into filling the hole in the middle of my sense of self-understanding.
A few months after I shouted out my proclamation from my lover’s bed, they ended our 11-month relationship. Our once powerful emotional connection was not severed with a clean cut, but torn and shredded, ragged and tattered. The idea of physical intimacy with them left my gut feeling clenched and tightened like a closed fist. As my body started to loosen over the following weeks and months, the picture formed by all of the pieces I’d been putting together became clearer: that it hadn’t been simply sex that drove me, but a hunger for intimacy and connection. A connection that I could only see in the jigsaw pieces that looked like “safety” and “home”.
Epilogue
Future Bistro seems louder and busier than usual tonight. But the sounds of everything and everyone around me — the conversations of the table behind me, flatware clinking against plates, and the wait staff calling out orders ready for pick up — all fades to a soft dullness in the bubble of my solitary table.
I don’t know how long I must have stared at that graphic of the Demisexal pride flag. Or how long I must have stared at the army of tabs seeming making their endless march towards it across my browser window. Their truncated titles match the notes in my head I’ve scribbled down, scratched over, and scribbled down again. It is a jagged timeline of how I got to this moment: a revolving door of countless online quizzes. Blog posts. Articles. And after that, Amazon listings for eBooks on Kindle: All About Demisexuality; The Invisible Orientation; Asexuality: A Brief Introduction.
I begin to notice the other browser window buried below, its own neglected army of tabs losing the battle for my attention: an half-finished ESL review game on Kahoot, a blank template for what should be a Present Continuous game on JeopardyLabs, and frenzied Google images searches surrounding the upcoming week’s textbook chapter for my lesson.
With a flick, I send it all down to bottom of my screen, and my consciousness.
The image of the Demisexual flag returns, a picture of a button on the Etsy page of a creator in the UK. Its bold black triangle and laser-like purple stripe focuses my memory and attention on all of the pieces I had tried to put together for almost a year now. I start to feel that last piece finally, truly fitting in. The whole picture becomes clearer now. The seams between the jigsaw pieces are melting away. I feel like I understand now.
Stretching my neck, I turn my head to see a girl from the table behind me catch my eye. But her line of sight seems to be going to my computer, not me. I catch the brief glimpse of a smile before returns to her conversation.
