I shoulda never listed to your woeful stories The ones I'm sure you told a thousand times before me THE FIRST TIME you traumatized me, I was 29. It was my initial year of graduate school and I had just moved back to the city. I was adapting to a new body; a better one, I thought, than the one that had given me so much trouble growing up. The one that made me hate myself. (But you didn’t know that girl, and never bothered to get to know her.) You got to meet the new me, the one that shed both the physical and metaphorical weight of my past. Our first date, I was disappointed. You looked like your pictures, sometimes, in certain lighting, but I didn’t feel any immediate attraction. You told me later it was love at first site for you. I found that so strange we had such different interpretations. I know now, that was a sign for me to not continue a romance with you…but this new me was attracted to your attraction to me. You weren’t like the other guys I had dated before, either;