Big Brown Hairy Worm of Loneliness

I knew him peripherally, friend of friends kind of thing, and I didn’t like the guy, probably because he reminded me of me–or no, I know why. It was because when I’d started up with the married poly woman, he and I happened to be walking in the same direction after the diner–and he usually got more laughs than I did at the diner, which I thought were undeserved–but I was excited to tell him about the poly woman and how her husband finally said it was okay for her to have sex with me, and he was like, “Yeah, I tried something like that; never doing that again.”

He was bald like me, though he did the shaved head thing, which I don’t believe in; as a bald man, I leave it all hanging out. But one day, I noticed he had this thick worm of hair behind his right ear and it was like the picture of loneliness, like he’d missed that spot so consistently that the hair had grown long there, and there was no one in his life who saw it and told him about it, like the ‘you’re such a good friend’ friend who says, “You have something stuck in your teeth.” And I was so lonely at the time, like I couldn’t get away from it, but at least this guy had a job, and no one told him or he got laughs at the diner and no one ever said, “Hey man, you got a big fat worm of loneliness crawling up the side of your head.”

And I wasn’t about to; I didn’t know him that well.