NOT THAT KIND OF GUY

Three days later, I find a scribbled letter

in my locker.

I was getting too close to you.

I don’t want a real girlfriend.

I love you, Maisie, so much,

but I don’t want to love you.

Funny.

There aren’t any Kahlil Gibran poems

for those sentiments.

Gino has written: I have this bad habit

of falling for someone

then leaving them;

I’m just like my no-good father,

who’s had three wives.

Don’t worry,

I won’t tell anyone how far we went,

I’m not that kind of a guy.

He adds, Please forgive me,

I’m never going to amount to anything …

and a lot of other pitiful-sounding sentences.

I have to stop reading,

because after all of that, it seems

the real reason he wrote the letter

was to make me feel sorry for him.

What a jerk: him.

What a bigger jerk: me.