Percentages

—Originally printed in Pear Noir! #4

There's a problem with falling for a mostly straight girl. And by mostly straight, I mean, when you and I met at the Christmas cocktail dress-up party a year ago, you in red spandex with white fur trim and me in my straight-from-work black slacks and grey cashmere, we both self-proclaimed that we were 97% straight at 3% doughnut curious (maybe we could call it situational sexuality wholly dependent on how hot the girl was), and we laughed about it, kissed about it, and went home together as our firsts and most likely lasts about it.

Going back to the problem(s). You like sex in the mornings. I hate morning breath. I like sex in the evenings. You hate missing the late shows. You smoke. I don't. You're vegan. I'm meat and potatoes. Which is all fine 97% of the time when we're both straight and only good friends, when we're bashing our ex-boyfriends or watching each other's backs at clubs for the creepy guys who want to feel us up or take us home to their creepy bachelor pads, but that 3% becomes a problem when I can't kiss you with smoke on your breath and you can't kiss me with steak on mine. And yeah, I'm going to go to fucking Starbucks because it's convenient and on the way to work, and hell no am I going to drive 7 miles in the opposite direction for your free-trade free-spirited socially responsible “statement coffee.”

Maybe during those fights we only 3% cared because we both knew we were 97% elsewhere, knowing we'd both eventually end up with guys: we'd suck their dicks, we'd have their kids, we'd deal with their raging prostates and erectile dysfunction, and we'd share their deathbeds and subsequently cemetery plots.

And in talking percentages, you'd think it'd be so easy to get over you because I'd only be 3% missing you, 3% wanting to make up with you, or 3% messed up over you, but I'm sitting here on the lower stairs of our empty townhouse sipping cold coffee out of your free-trade free-spirited mug because 100% of me couldn't get up the rest of those steps knowing that during the 3% of us, I was actually 100% kissing you, 100% fingering you, 100% going down on you, 100% wanting you and only you. But the proof was there in the numbers from day 1, hour 1, kiss 1, fuck 1: we were mathematically doomed from the start.