Putty.

        I recently was blessed with a summer fling.  I've always wanted one, I've always wanted to fall in love in a summer or kiss someone while sitting in grass under the universe's welcoming glow.  I'm not falling in love, but I am infatuated and it is summer and we do make out and stuff.  I think it's a summer fling, but who knows.  Gay men seem to be scared of labels, I am not one of those men.  I think he is though.  At any rate, he likes bright colors, smiles incessantly and holds me really nicely.  
        The prospect of dating in the summer fascinates me, because it's foreign, as I either date in the lonely months of winter or I date men who can't process the words, "lets go on a nature walk."  I've never dated someone who kissed me under that stars.  I've always wanted to.  I've always been eager to taste the lips of a man, and at that moment feel the universal nudge.  I almost had it once, with Cow.  We had taken a road trip to a hippie festival in Minnesota with our mutual friends Aurora and Bre.  It was mid June and Cow and I had been dating for about three months.
        Our road trip started by me locking the keys in the trunk and Aurora showing up with almost no luggage with so much whiskey in her stomach her face swelled.  After Aurora danced on my car in heels, leaving dents as deep as oil mils, and having the security guard at a near by art school unlock my car with a crow bar, I started to feel like the universe was telling me something.  As if it were telling me to clench my but hole and get ready for the ride, because I was  about to go on a wild road trip with someone I was going to fall wildly in love with.
        The first night there were no lights.  We were driving Auora's 1968 beater she picked up from her father who lived in Minnesota, coming back from a party in the middle of a forest.  Her car began to overheat, and we had to pull over on a desolate dark highway.  While waiting for the car to cool, we rested our heads on the still warm pavement, I could hear my hair crunch, and we were astonished by the intensity and power of the stars.  I leaned in to kiss Cows cheek.  He turned away.  When he felt my embarrassment and disappointed he put his pinkey around mine. That's all he could give me, and I took it.
         Still convinced Cow possessed the ability to give me my dream kiss under the heavens, I tried again while we found ourselves on top of a building with no way down, after stealing my art from a gallery ran by shit for brains.  We had just finished hoisting down the last painting from the window when we decided to take a break on the roof.  I plopped my head in Cow's lap.  His small hands rested at his sides soaking up pebbles of those tiny rocks on roofs (I read once those are actually meteorites), we were both staring at the three stars visible through the smog of Kansas City.  I asked him to kiss me and he said, "It just doesn't feel right right now."  I should mention that the window we came out of, had since shut under its own weight, leaving us stranded and waiting for our friend Maria to come with a ladder.  Maybe it wasn't the right time, but it should have been.
        I held out hope that Cow would kiss me and I would feel that universal nudge, but all I felt was the universes hand taking my own and telling me to follow it away from him.  I feel that love awakens people, and I think that through the love that I have had, I can feel the universe.  Mostly I feel it when it's telling me to leave.  Some people call this intuition, but I don't think those people have loved a bad man and have experienced the spiritual pull to escape it's bodies return to that man.  I have loved bad men and I have watched good men who I loved become bad men.
       My friends often asked me when I was with Cow, why I was with Cow.  After Cow flicked a cigarette in my face in front of my peers, it became hard to justify why I stayed. Thankfully though, I'm damn good at denial in addition to being ritiously convening.  Cow will be the last time I do that.
I renounce my love of shitty men.  Tony is the boy I'm infatuated with now.  He is kind.  And the universe isn't pulling me in any direction, it's telling me to be patient and still.  I trust this and so I am still.