Girls

The thing about girls like me
is that we're not always desperate to become girls like that. we aren't
characters in a movie or sad girls
waiting to be rescued; I don't empathize with a modern-day Cinderella
or Juliet, geeky and falling for the jock, I really don't want to be
'popular' or date the guy in an Abercrombie button down.

The thing about girls like me
is that we're not easy; you can't size us up
with a cliche and sometimes we're shy and
often awkward and usually weird;
on the outside an unfulfilled fantasy
to boys like that but unpredictable in the head.
nor am I the eccentric Marla from Fight Club
or lead in 'She's all that',

(note that nobody remembers her name
but everyone knows her story).

The thing about girls like me is that when we meet boys like that
they get ahead of themselves, fancy they are
a white knight and convince themselves it's chemistry, a love story
or something they've seen on film; but they usually end up
adverse to the truth and once we've given in
they'll change us. Dress, reform, make us
over and pretty and normal.
We aren't like you
and that's why we didn't talk before. Dating is not a
super-power that estranges insensitive borders
to girls like us; you think because we're out of junior high
we'll reconcile and it doesn't matter, but had I gone to yours
you wouldn't look twice now,


just like you didn't then.


"I've never had a girl like you before," they always say.

You see the wheels in their head turning
with a theoretical future, the fantasy of rescuing a girl
and something about love at first sight and inner beauty.



"Damn straight."