Shame

by C. K. Williams

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,
offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at
first she'd found me—
I can't remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable,
out-of-things—
she'd decided that I was after all all right…twelve years later she comes back to me
from nowhere
and I realize that it wasn't my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want
she meant,
which, when we'd been introduced, I'd naturally aimed at her and which she'd
easily deflected,
but that she'd thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,
what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible
humiliation.