Your skin is translucent, a thin layer of warm glass like the pane of a picture frame, the painting below of soft whites and pinks with constellations of beauty marks and freckles. The heat passing into me through my hands resting on your back. Perfect conduction of energy.

I never meet men in bars or at dance parties, though I’ve met hundreds of men who do. Finally, I break my never—at a dance party in Sydney, a yearly fund-raiser for the state AIDS organization. There, chemically flying on ecstasy bumped up with hits of acid, I wandered through the crowd aimlessly, wearing a halo of lights and haze and spare vibrations from the dance track.

Did you see me first? Did I see you? All I know is that I stopped. Then joined in your swaying: unusual movements, your shoulders mostly up around your ears as if your whole body could disappear, melt and be sucked into a hole in the middle of your chest.

“Well, aren’t you cute?” Your voice is somehow clear above the music. You touch my arms above the elbows gently. A studded collar around your neck with spikes of fake danger, bare torso, shiny black pants that match your dark pupils. You lean in to kiss me and I fall and fall and fall.

When I come to, we’re in another place in the dance hall.

“I’d like to take you home with me.” Your voice has laughter in it. That and a melody, a tenor saxophone line in an upper octave, clear and precise, warm as spring coming on.

Nodding is all I do.

“But I want to tell you something first. I’m HIV positive. Have been for ten years, never been sick. I just wanted to make sure you’re OK with that. Some people have a problem with it.”

Positive, I think. “No problem.” My blood is negative. My mind is positive. Yes. Yes. Yes. “Take me home.”

We’re awake and weary and tired and buzzed up when we fall across your white sheets. “Turn over,” you command and your hands are upon me, long and firm strokes of massage up and down the length of my back, shoulders and neck, scalp, and then lower down, buttocks, thighs, calves, feet. “Now, the other side.” My nipples hardening under the circles of your palms, my cock lifting up to touch your thighs as you kneel over me.

We’re stripped naked. You’re not a big man. You have a slim, sculpted muscularity and I would guess a fast metabolism. Also, the texture of an older man, skin moves easily below my fingers above a strength that has taken time to build.

Size is a nice surprise, and I’m astonished. Your cock is enormous. Dark and round and thick. Ecstasy takes away my hunger, but this makes me famished. I want to eat and drink for days at a banquet table fit for the king and queen of all those old countries that still hang on to royalty.

We make love for hours, and move between massage and long kisses and my mouth on your cock and yours on my anus. I want to do the same to you, but you say, no, it’s dangerous.

Neither of us can come with the drugs still coursing through our systems. For what seems like hours, I go through a stage of having to leave the bed every few minutes to urinate. But in the end, side by side, my head on your chest, hands on that astonishing skin, we come to a natural finish.

“It was amazing.”

“I wanted to make sure that you felt you could do anything, and that we didn’t have to fuck if you didn’t want to.”

“Well, maybe next time.”

You look at me with a glint in your eyes.

Positive. Words repeat in my mind. Yes. Yes. Yes.

You become all of the positive lovers I have ever had and will ever have. What is unique to you, I revel in. I eroticize. I turn you into the letters of the word desire. I know it is perverse to do this. But is this not who we are, what we are, where our potential lies: the possibility of moving beyond borders, normality, the usual? Transcendence.

In fact, it’s how we got here, crossing lines, sneaking past customs officers. Both of us countries on a map where the shorelines magically fit into each other, an isthmus into a bay.

Though I remain negative, I am becoming positive all the time, not in the cells of my blood or the hidden recesses of my brain, but in the way magnets change each other, the way electrical charges alter and become the same.

I celebrate masculinity. I saw a photo of your younger self and the face was round, like a boy’s: the shapes of sun and moon and celestial bodies. Soft forms. Now the drugs have made your face gaunt, your cheekbones have risen like mornings and your cheeks have strong lines carved into them. I say this to you: You look like a man. Your profile is an exaggerated model, a cartoon superhero, sleek and virile. And strong like seaside cliffs that weather wind and salt night and day and all of the middle hours. A few of my body parts fit perfectly into those crevices.

For a time, the Crixivan causes your stomach to protrude, and I know this makes you shy in public. Ignore the wondering eyes. I see a yin to the yang. The roundness here softens the angle in your face. Your belly protrudes and gives birth to new forms, to all of your hopes and fears, to petty victories and multiplying neuroses. I run my hands over it and it is the shape a belly should be, a shallow overturned bowl of the finest cracked porcelain, a dark shade of ivory, coveted by the museum that guards it.

This month, I am fascinated by your veins, the way they stand out, the rivers and streams on your arms in shades of blue, the color of sensitivity and communication. I can see the way your blood reaches your fingers, which are warm when you touch me.

When you changed the combination of therapy, you lost weight. Now, you worry how thin you have become, about taking on skeletal form. The drugs waste your muscles. Fat flies off of you. It hurts to sit down for long periods because the bones in your buttocks are sharp. But look again in the mirror. Your body stretches up to the sky like a giraffe, you are lean like a gazelle, the sun on these African plains pleases you. Your flesh unencumbered is elegant, the body of dancers you have admired and here you are free of practice and training and a hundred painful jetés.

I hold you, you are light in my arms. Like cradling the skull of a newborn, a chick in the palm of your hand, a crystal glass between thumb and forefinger. You are so heady and soft that I drink you like champagne, or wine casked before the wars, so fine that it does not touch your throat on its way to your stomach.

How could I not want to make love to you? Like when the old down comforter split open under the rips of our passion and we had sex amidst feathers, a ghostly flock of ducks glad to bequeath us a backdrop. Our sweat and cum made the down stick together in soft clumps. Listen. If you were heavier, I would not have you. I have gotten used to this lack of gravity.

I love you for your vulnerability. Your body weak. From a cold made worse from a drug side effect, still the lingering cough? No, this time, it is the diarrhea, a river that doesn’t stop, all of the insides pouring out and the drugs making you unable to hold in liquid or food. Out, it says. Expel.