Happiness, for the speaker of "Gigi," is like a language they once spoke and have since forgotten. The words are all around them and the people saying them are kind, but nothing quite lands. The poem is about what happens when love finally comes after a long drought and the person it was meant for cannot believe in it. Its central idea is that getting what you wanted does not automatically let you receive it. Long deprivation leaves a habit of suspicion, and that suspicion brings its own guilt.
The guilt is there before the first line. The subtitle, «i shouldn't.», sits in guillemets, which makes it look like a thought caught mid-whisper or a sentence the speaker keeps interrupting themselves with. It sets the pitch for everything that follows, a refusal turned inward. The poem never says who Gigi is, whether the speaker, someone addressed, or someone remembered, and that gap leaves the weight on the feeling rather than the story.
The first half is built on repetition. "i should be use to" opens five lines in a row, and the effect is a lesson being recited, or a self-scolding. The list moves from the noisy and physical ("the stamped," which I read as the thunder of running feet, though the word is ambiguous, and "the giggling") to touch ("the kisses and hugs") and finally to the abstract pair "happiness and joy." The speaker lists what any ordinary life seems to contain, as if checking off what they ought to take for granted. The slips in the text, "use to" for "used to" and the wandering between "i" and "I", give the poem an unpolished, spoken texture. Whether deliberate or not, that suits a voice that is confessing rather than performing.
Then the pattern breaks. "but since i have not felt them in so long it feels foreign" is the longest, least punctuated line so far, and it runs on like a single breath. "Foreign" is the key word. It suggests a country the speaker once lived in and can no longer find their way around. It also explains why the earlier list sounds so dutiful: the speaker is naming things they have to remind themselves are normal. What follows is almost a tennis match of very short lines: "it shouldn't. / but it does." The whole poem lives in that exchange between what ought to be felt and what is felt. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The music comes from insistence, from the repeated "should" and the triple "i do, i do, i do," which sounds like someone pressing on a bruise to confirm it is still there. It is hard not to hear a faint echo of a wedding vow in that phrase, though the poem never pushes the connection, and here the words are a confession of unease rather than a promise.
The fear is spelled out in plain terms. The love is "fake," something that "will go away when i least expect it." The speaker pictures love as something that can be withdrawn without warning, so expecting its loss becomes a kind of armor. If you are already braced, the disappearance cannot ambush you. The last two lines show this logic at work. "maybe I'm just being paranoid" offers the comforting explanation, and "but maybe i'm, just maybe I'm right" takes it back. The stumbling comma and the doubled "maybe" make the speaker sound as if they are edging toward an admission they do not want to make. The poem ends on the word "right," which is a small tragedy, because being right here would mean losing the very thing the speaker has waited for.
What makes the poem worth reading is how honestly it describes a second layer of pain. Not trusting happiness is hard enough, but the speaker also blames themselves for it, and the repeated "shouldn't" turns the doubt into a private failing. There are no elaborate metaphors, and the plain words are the poem's strength. Anyone who has braced for a good thing to be taken away will recognize the voice. The poem offers no cure and ends in doubt rather than comfort, which feels truer than a neat resolution would.