Cute Tim comes and goes

It's six am on a Monday morning and Cute Tim has just left. He called me yesterday afternoon to say he was going to be in town for a night, in transit from Eau Claire to New York City, and could he crash at my place? As usual, only a few hours to scrub the toilet, scrape a razor blade across my bachelor's face, toss out the fast-food boxes and sniff out a clean pair of skivvies from the laundry basket. I like it when Cute Tim does this. Last time he was on the light rail, mere stops from my work place. This time he arrived in a kind of shroud of wetted toilet paper, the Sunday being a soggy mess, snow melted by noon, no one on the streets, the quality of light such that it revealed how poorly my street keeps up their clapboards. We fell quickly into each other's arms. Things work out best this way. Something about the way we met--weeks before he moved out of town, and something about our pillow-talk, in which we earnestly berate the other for not keeping up, unnoticed slights and such, make these sorts of sporadic, spontaneous encounters work for me. I'm not sure much would have come out of us being together in the same city, doing the whole 'dating thang' but it's so much more somehow because it's so much less. I promised I'd remember his birthday next time. I was awake at four am, listening to odd footsteps on the streets and the drippings. His taxi came at 5:30 and he was gone, me pulling him into bed one last time and him pulling his suitcase across the street.

boys will be boys; get a penpal in prison who's gay; wet t-shirt contest meets modern dance