This is how he tastes. This is how he sounds. They say a muse is female but I don't swing that way. I like the boys, their big, solid bodies and the tension when you know that, should the dominoes of attraction and circumstance tip just so, they'd be on you, penetrating you with animal urgency, and you couldn't resist. You wouldn't want to. As a concept, I cannot resist him. He must be male.

When he whispers in my ear, I hear the drunken stars laughing along with my coy secrets. My stomach goes butterflies and my fingers tingle with masturbatory hunger. He wants to hear my voice. He makes me want to hear myself talk.

It was scary at first, letting him slip into me like a needle. I was excited, but I didn't know what would happen. I worried strangers would haul me from some foreign sidewalk, take me to a hospital where I lacked the language to tell the doctors where it hurt and my pockets were empty and grubby from too much searching. But he reassured me. He said he'd stay up with me all night, my head in his lap as I watched the visions swirl across the ceiling. It was almost true, but not quite. I couldn't tell if he left because I was coming down, or I came down because I needed to be sober to be alone.

It used to be intoxicating. Even in winter, under Christmas lights, we had teenage summer love. There were times I caught him in the shower, the flash of icily articulated muscle peeking out from behind the blur of the curtain, and found myself standing under the water with him for hours. Then we got older, we had quick trysts under sad, rumpled sheets in grey rooms, or during afternoons playing hooky, on the couch. It left me incomplete, it left me empty. It got so I couldn't tell who was giving and who was taking.

The noise became a ringing in my ears, like the ocean in a seashell. I saw him less and wanted more of him. He complied petulantly, but when he came, nothing happened. His loss is a frantic ache and I try to paste his likeness onto other vices, disgusted with myself for wasting what we had, for not knowing when to say when. Now I'm any other junkie, chasing a void I've lost through my own excesses. He kisses me and there are no waterfalls, no starscapes, just the sound of freeways and me getting further from where I hoped to find myself.