Just a Little Gay

Tonight Katy calls me from Minnesota. She is drunk. She is in the tub. She is drinking wine and writing sestinas about me in the tub.

To be fair, I might've sent her an e-mail earlier in the day that requested she write a sestina about me tonight while I was in my creative writing class making my students puzzle out sestinas of their own.

When she calls, she reads me a few lines. "This is going to sound just a little gay," she says.

One of her end words was eggplant. Another was meat. There were lines that made us sound like lesbians of historic proportions.

"Oh!" she moans. "I'm not a poet!"

She is a little angry at herself. Before she got in the tub, she'd started brainstorming. She wanted to think of all the reasons she loved me. I love Jess, she thought, because we went to the Spam Museum together. Then, I love Jess because she and I went and looked up Jolly Green's leaf skirt together.

She is not happy with the reasons she'd come up with.

"What's wrong with those?" I ask her.

"That's not real," she says. "Those aren't reasons to love someone."

But I think those are the best reasons to love someone. You someone because she looks at you and says, "I will go wherever you go, no matter how ridiculous it is. I will follow you forever, and it will be the best thing I ever do." And then it is.

Later in the conversation, Katy sighs and tells me she won't be making it out to Maine in October like she'd planned. She won't see any foliage. She won't crack open a lobster. She won't breathe the briny air. And because of this, she is sad.

"I just want to come out there and huddle in your arms for a month," she says.

And that is probably the cutest thing she's ever said to me. And possibly the gayest.