Mania (μανία)

Middle school is not made for asexual individuals, but I didn’t know it yet. Lack of sexual drive is not something you learn you have until you’ve been on Summer’s basement couch watching Titanic. There, Rose and Jack were dying for each other, floating on the makeshift raft amidst the ocean’s freezing waves. Jack was drowning, Summer was crying, the teenage couple was frenching on the couch, and I was willing time to go faster. The kissing couple had been at it for all three hours of the movie: loud and slurpy, hands raking up sides into hair, Syd as close to Luke as ninth graders are allowed to be with friends in near proximity and parents upstairs. I sat there watching Jack and Rose as the sound of sloppy kissing rang in my ears, and I willed myself to crave this lack of breath, these gasps of air in a lover’s presence, and yet. . . . And yet. I watched Jack drown and thought: finally.

 

Agape (ἀγάπη)

Children lack filters, but them not having control of what they say means that they’re as honest as they are innocent. While on a plane to London from Norway during a college study abroad trip, I sat across from a British mother and her two girls. Our disembarkment was delayed, so they stood in the aisle next to me while I waited for an opportunity to get up. The youngest of the girls took an interest in me and leaned in to tell me that she liked my hair, far different from her own tight black curls. For her, she didn’t see my white skin as anything other than far lighter than her own, nor did she know anything about my identity beyond what she could see. What mattered to her was the platinum and purple colors to my hair and the numerous earrings in my ears that she reached out to gently touch with my permission. Their mother was hesitant about me as a stranger, though she talked with me until the line moved and she could take her girls off the plane. When I was finally off and walking down the hallway toward passport control, I saw them along the side, the mother on the phone. The girls looked up at me, smiled, and gave me a wave. I waved back.

 

Storge (στοργή)

My father randomly buys me flowers. When I was little I always assumed there was a holiday I had forgotten, a Daughter’s Day that only he knew and one whose exact date I could never quite pin down. But no; my father forwent national days of cheer and instead became a sporadic gift giver. Some days I would fling my backpack through the door and drag my feet to my room. I would enter to see my dresser adorned with a bundle of the prettiest roses my father could find: pink, yellow, red, white—whatever made him think of me. They were a beautiful burst of light in an otherwise normal childhood day. I would remind myself of this act when he would playfully pinch my legs a little too hard, when he forgot the names of my friends or the stories I told him about my day. Because, despite it all, when he thought of me, he thought of flowers. On my first week back to college after a rough semester, there was a knock on the door, a man holding a vase. Within it were flowers from dad, burnt orange and cream-white roses interlaced with daisies and greenery. They sat on my shelf until they wilted to rot. He didn’t know what my favorite color was, but oh how he had chosen my favorite flower. Something he always remembered.

 

Pragma (πραγμα)

Eva and I have been friends since the first day of third grade where we bonded over Otter Pops and our matching bright blonde hair. Yet it was our enjoyment of marshmallows that sealed the deal. We somehow stayed friends when she moved away at the end of that same school year, becoming one another’s first long-distance relationship. Though we weren’t texters, we did coordinate meetup dates for the birthday vacation I would take every July just to see her. Through elementary to middle to high school we saw each other through it all. One week, every year, for eight years. We would leave each other one way and return as a new person. She morphed from a puzzle gamer to a horror game fanatic—while I delved into romance anime. I became a brunette, she stayed blonde. She dated boys constantly and I hadn’t had a crush since the year before we met. I feared for the day she would grow tired of me, the way I had become. And yet, my junior year of high school she moved back and we started hanging out more than we had in the nine years we had been best friends. It was around a campfire, thirteen years from that third-grade playground, that I watched Eva, with a dyed head of bright red hair, hold her girlfriend’s hand. In our palms were marshmallows carefully roasting. Everything had changed, but nothing had. 

 

Mania (μανία)

If you were a young girl that wasn’t boy crazy, you were an outcast, so with all the logic of a neurodivergent asexual girl amidst her peers just beginning to brim with hormones, I overcompensated. At the time, The Hunger Games movie had just been released as the anticipated staple of 2010s young adult fiction, and a friend had invited our friend group over to watch it as part of her birthday party turned sleepover, supervised by her dad. Faith prodded each of us about our take on the “love triangle”: were we Team Gale or Team Peeta, and yes, one man must be fawned over. Ten-year-old me thought that this was the ultimatum, the options I could choose between, so I did what I could to sell myself as one of the girls. I practically clambered into the chair with Faith’s dad to inform him of why Team Gale was superior—entirely because I perceived Liam Hemsworth to be the more conventionally attractive man. This moment would be a joke I wouldn’t live down until high school. I wish someone would have told me I didn’t need boy obsessions, especially at such a young age.

 

Agape (ἀγάπη)

I was eating spicy chicken rice in an underground mall in South Korea. I was armed with chopsticks (which I thankfully already knew how to use) and a spoon which sat uselessly on the side of the table. I dug in with my mouth agape, chopsticks losing rice in my wake, when a woman put her hand on my wrist. Her hands were wrinkled and thin, her mouth thinning as she shook her head at me with a disapproving pout. We both lacked the words to convey my questions and for her to answer them. Instead, ever so gently like a mother teaching a child, she demonstrated using the spoon to make the rice into a mountain with the assistance of chopsticks to plop my chicken onto the top of it. I repeated the procedure and she nodded approvingly as I thanked her in my broken Korean. She went back to her meal without a word. I sat remembering the gleeful nature her gaze had taken on as I confidently made the perfect bite. We parted with one more kamsahamnida before we walked separate ways out the tunnel into our separate lives, my belly full with chicken and rice. 

 

Storge (στοργή)

Every so often, my grandpa tells me about a distant relative of ours. It’s usually when I’ve curled up in the chair next to him and our chatter has quieted, leaving us sitting in a comfortable silence until he’s inspired to break it. Sometimes it’s when I’ve mentioned that traveling is where I’ve felt the most like myself. It always feels poignant, as if he somehow knows that I don’t feel attraction despite us never having discussed it. I doubt he knows the word I use to describe it. He’s almost eighty, has lived only in rural Utah, and is a man of traditional, conservative religious beliefs, and yet, with respect and something somehow akin to understanding, he recounts how this relative has never been married or settled down, instead choosing to spend her life and work seeing what the country and the world hold for her. “It’s what makes her happy,” he finishes each time. Without fail, I open my mouth to explain my asexuality and aromanticism to him because a little piece of me thinks he’ll understand, at least a little bit. I always snap my jaw shut instead.

 

Eros (ἔρος)

My best friend is infatuated with her boyfriend. They’ve been together for three weeks, and for that duration of time, the two of them have been so attached that I’ve rarely seen her around the apartment. When I do, he’s with her, flirting or dancing in the kitchen, or he’s in her room, waiting for her to come back and shut her door behind her. Two weeks in with hardly any sight of her, she woke me up from a nap to tell me that she’d done it—lost her virginity—the night before. She’d looked overjoyed, and in retrospect she’d had the brightest smile I’ve seen on her, but I’d merely blinked at her, told her congratulations, and shoved down yet another rush of emotions I’ve been smothering for weeks. She is blindingly happy, but all I can feel is the grief of acknowledging that I was ignorant to believe our friendship wouldn’t change because of a partner.

 

Pragma (πραγμα)

My parents’ story reads like a generic Hallmark movie plot: two kids grow up in the same rural town and fall in love as high-school sweethearts. The boy, a wrestler; the girl, a cheerleader. From the time they started dating, they were inseparable, one trailing closely behind the other wherever they went. In college, they lived down the hall from each other, and when my dad decided to serve a religious mission, my mom wrote him letters until he came home. She has an album of every letter, sticker, picture, and scrap of paper my dad ever sent her, carefully compiled and preserved. I’m not allowed to read any of them despite being an adult myself; I figure some things are meant to be between lovers and lovers alone. The two of them set a fairytale precedent for my love life, and I grew up with their story in my mind as what I needed to find for myself. Perhaps that’s why understanding attraction is out of my grasp and why I’ve started to look at them with grief.

 

Philia (φιλία)

During a writing conference where some of my friends and I were sharing an Airbnb, I had a breakdown, one of those that I didn’t even realize was sneaking up until my chest had heaved and I’d let myself drop to the carpet: Archer, one of these friends, had asked me to wait for them to walk back together, and I’d made it almost entirely back to the house with a few of the others before I realized they weren’t with me. Luckily, another one of our group members had found them, and the two were on their way back, but the guilt left my veins sore and my stomach tossed. Archer tried to tease me about leaving them, not truly mad that it had slipped my mind since they’d been privy to the causes of my rising stress levels, but I’d ended up staring at them with tears brimming in my eyes until I found myself sinking against the side of the couch and apologizing through a sob. Despite not being one for physical touch, Archer knelt down and wrapped their arms around me, letting me press as close to them as I needed to. Others of our group, knowing only that I was crying, quickly surrounded me. We ended up piling onto the couch that night, every last one of us, to watch a movie while bundled in blankets. Archer stayed with an arm pressed reassuringly against mine the entire time. 

 

Eros (ἔρος)

It is my junior year of high school. My mother and I sit in our farm-style kitchen where she passively mentions her children’s lack of romantic connections. I attempt to articulate that, for me, romantic relationships feel like a chore especially when I don’t want the additional “benefits” of sex. I know she doesn’t want me having sex like my sister has sex; which is to say with multiple people; which is to say with boys my mom doesn’t agree with; which is to say premarital. So it shocks me when her face twists incredulously as she states, “It’s not my fault you don’t have a sex drive.” She means, “It’s not my fault you won’t put yourself out there.” She means, “Everyone has a sex drive.” She means, “You just have to look for the right person. Why won’t you look?” She means, “I want you to be happy.” She means, “To be happy you need to date, so you can marry, so you can have sex (but have it right), so you can have kids and be happy like I am happy.” She means, “How can you be happy if you don’t do it like this?” But she says, “It’s not my fault you don’t have a sex drive.” It’s not mine either. It’s not mine either.

 

Philia (φιλία)

Anna and I sat in a bundle of blankets we had gathered in droves out of the house. It had rained hours previous, and without the sun to dry it, the dirt was still damp. We built a cocoon as protection, then piled into its center with Anna in my lap as she sobbed, heaved, and lost the ability to breathe. You’d have thought she were dying, and in some ways she was: heart torn open by a boy. She had me scratch her head gently and begged me to tell her the plot to a book, to help her think about anything that wasn’t him. So I did. Told her book one, then book two. By then she was crying gently enough to where she criticized my lack of scratches and I complained about the ache in my wrist before I pushed the hair away from her tear-streaked face. By book three she laughed at my failing memories of the plot and she didn’t stop laughing until the end of book four where I forgot the ending. By then the moisture had soaked its way through the blanket into the back of my pants, into her knees and stomach, damp where she laid out in front of me. It was two a.m. and we had class the next morning, but the stars were out that night. We interlocked our fingers, turned our backs to blanket, blanket to grass, and grew colder in the approaching winter air. We watched Orion rise high in the sky for hours. Who needed anything other than this?