I tell myself that it’s safe to fall
for taken boys who love their girlfriends.

“It must be nice.” I tell him with a smile and two blinks,
and he looks at me quizzically and replies with a “sometimes”
and I look back towards the lake as he blushes and the sunlight burns my skin.

I’m not saying that loving me will be any better. In fact,
It will probably be worse and there will be more bad times than good.
I’d get clingy and become too attached to his cinnamon eyes and his milk-and-honey smile. I’d skip classes to run my fingers along his “swim to the moon” chest tattoo, which he explains to me is about a man lost at sea and coming to terms with his life and eventually, his death.
And I wonder what that would be like, but not for too long because I would get sad.

His mother died when he was nine years old, he explains to me, and that’s why he gets so introspective. And I know all about introspection, but nothing about dead mothers so I don’t say anything.

He laughs off the moment before it becomes too heavy, and I continue puling the grass out of the ground, as I always do when I don’t know what to say.

Yes, it’s a good thing to fall for taken boys, because you can blame their rejection on the other girl, and not yourself.

So I stand to leave, with shaky knees and pinpricks in my feet from sitting too long, and I hope I don’t accidentally try to hug him because it would make things awkward and we would stop sitting together by the lake after class.

I walk home and hope he passes his drug test, so that he can get hired at Wal-Mart for the summer and move in with his girlfriend, whom he loves.

And I will fly to Paris one weekend, and meet someone else with stronger hands and softer lips, who would also have a girlfriend.