I’ve never been good with the ladies. I could befriend them, but getting girlfriends was another story. In fact, I’d say most of my relationships were imaginary.
Oh hell, they all were. Now, I don’t mean imaginary in the psychotic way; I am completely sane...a slight god-complex, but sane nonetheless. My friends, however? The jury is still out on them. Throughout my three years in middle school, they created for me four imaginary relationships that I can recall.
Before I go any further, I feel compelled to explain why I have been referring to my flings as “relationships” instead of imaginary girlfriends. Simply put, this is because my friends apparently thought me to be bisexual. Therefore, half of my imaginary lovers were male. Well, as male as a drawing and a spork can be.
The first two relationships were quite similar and uneventful. My first was a female stick figure drawn on a conventional piece of paper. I can’t remember much about her, as my memory is horrid. As for my second, he was also a drawing, this time on a piece of brown paper torn from a lunch bag.. All that I have stored in my memory about him is that his name was Mike before he was destroyed, torn from my heart and into little pieces.
Now is when it gets interesting. Sometime in the eighth grade, my friend Nathan walked up to my lunch table and presented me with the favorite of my partners. His name was Spooner, he was a spork, and I loved him. He was plain, only a simple spork with a smiley face drawn on, but his backstory more than made up for that fact. I decided that he was bisexual, as I apparently was, due to the fact that he was a spork, and was also quite depressed. Being half spoon, half fork was mentally anguishing for him. Good enough to ladle up corn, but with the constant threat of scratching the upper lip of his user; good enough to cut the disgusting school meat, but too flexible to actually pick it up. Because of this, he tried to kill himself by suffocation. That is why he was found in the cafeteria wrapped in plastic. However, just as he was taking his last breath, he was saved by Nathan. He immediately fell for Nathan, but was cast aside, drawn on, and given to me.
Yes, it was a really boring day. So boring that I kept Spooner out on my desk for the rest of the day, lending me moral support. After a few hours of staring at Spooner and completely neglecting my lessons, Spanish with Ms. Hughes came at last. So, I plopped down in my chair, grabbed Spooner from my pocket, and placed him gingerly on the desk. Not even five minutes into the lesson, Ms. Hughes, who will henceforth be referred to as That Evil Old Witch, swooped down upon me and demanded that I hand over my love. When I asked why she would do such a thing, she claimed that my Spooner was a weapon due to his supposedly sharp and painful prongs. Once again did he find himself in trouble for being half fork.
I surrendered Spooner over to her willingly enough; I didn’t feel like getting detention or worse. That was the last I ever saw of him. That Evil Old Witch promised that I would get him back by the end of the year, but I never received him. At the end of the year, when I confronted That Evil Old Witch about the subject, she laughed and told me to go away. I did, dejected, and with a spork-shaped hole in my heart.
That last of my imaginary sweethearts was, like the drawings before her, a stick figure. However, like Spooner, she was three-dimensional. My friend Shelby was, for some reason now unknown to me, playing with pipe cleaners one morning. This was not long after my loss of Spooner, and knowing that I was grieving, made me a girlfriend out of pipe cleaners to assuage my overwhelming melancholy. The only significant story about her is that she, like Spooner, didn’t even last one day. Later on in the day of her birth, a couple of my friends(and one outsider) were at my house practicing a play for English class, a Shakespearian play about those meddling kids in Mystery, Inc. I went inside for a moment to look for something, and when I came out she was hanging, by pipe cleaner noose, to a large fir tree in my backyard. I was told she tore herself from this mortal world because she was so depressed because she was brought into said world for the sole purpose of loving me, a task which she did not wish to be charged with.
After that, my friends were finished with giving me imaginary lovers. Many tragedies ensued after the creation of the first, including suicides and a kidnaping, but the biggest tragedy of all was that, because I only had them for a short amount of time, I was never able to consummate any of the relationships.
