I stood up and poured us each a cup of black coffee, knowing that neither Ly nor I could handle the extra calories of adding cream and sugar. As I handed Ly his coffee, my stomach let out a loud, noticeable gurgle of hunger.

“Sorry!” I muttered as I buried my face in the sleeve of my shirt in embarrassment that my body would cry out for the basic necessity of food.

“It’s cool,” he said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out two white pills. “Here, take these, they’ll help.” He smiled and winked as he dropped the pills into the open palm of my eagerly awaiting hand.

I gulped the pills down with a swig of coffee. “How long do I have?”

“Within ten to twenty minutes, you’ll be feeling fan-fucking-tastic and won’t have the slightest craving for food!” A Joker-sized grin crossed his face as the enveloping natural light streaming through my apartment windows momentarily illuminated his eyes, revealing the enlarged black pools of his pupils that were the only indication that he was high.

“Nice!” I replied as I raised my cup of coffee in cheers to Ly and to my ensuing inebriation.

Ly stood up and began to move with a feline grace around my apartment. Though his clothes were intended to be form-fitting, they hung loose and baggy on his emaciated frame. His head, with its thick deluge of hair, looked wider than the width of his shoulders. His arms, revealed by the restrictions of his t-shirt, looked like spider’s limbs. If I were to have drawn him, he would have looked like a stick figure. Yet despite this stiff, skeletal appearance, he moved with the poise and elegance of a ballet dancer from a painting by Edgar Degas. He slid up to the same large-scale canvas that Elio had examined the night before and stared at it with the same look of anticipation and expectation as Elio.

“What are you going to do with this?” Ly asked as he began brushing his fingertips along the tightly wrapped, extensively gessoed surface.

“Oh, I have plans!” I replied coyly as I awkwardly scratched my right eyebrow and the left side of my face broke into a suspicious smile. “I have plans!”

“I bet you do,” he replied.

He exhaled a seemingly never-ending cloud of cancerous smoke that reflected off the bleached-white surface of the painting’s support and caused the entire space around him to be covered in a blue-gray haze. With the cigarette between his fingers, Ly thrust his arms over his head and stretched his body into an elegant, sinuous line. His shirt lifted to reveal his protruding hip bones and concave stomach. I wanted this for myself, in both a personal and sexual sense.

“I want to create a painting of Elio.” I scanned what I could see of Ly's face, hoping to gauge his reaction to my comment. He inhaled brusquely and twisted his jaw as he struggled to maintain his emotionless examination of my soon-to-be masterpiece.

I got up and stood next to him. I fought back the urge to touch him, instead folding my hands together behind my back. I could feel him struggle to sustain the pace of his breath as our shoulders nearly brushed together. Our eyes shifted and became momentarily fixed on each other. The look we exchanged wasn’t one of longing or sexual desire, but rather one of deep and personal understanding, respect, and platonic love. A look that could only be shared by true friends, by two people who really knew and really understood each other.

He averted his gaze and asked in a soft-toned voice, “When are you going to finish my parents' painting?”

Ly’s parents are insanely wealthy, and huge supporters of me and my artistic career. I suspected this was because they felt I brought out the best in Ly, and they appreciated the seemingly positive influence I brought to his life experience. They had willingly overpaid me for a commissioned painting, and I was determined not to disappoint them. Unfortunately, I had become distracted by Elio and had fallen behind on my work.

“Soon,” I muttered. “Soon.” 

The high began to overtake my perception as I turned to stare at the blank canvas. My mind’s eye was suddenly flooded with visions of possible paintings that could occupy this available space. I stood motionless, never blinking, and breathing so lightly it was as though I wasn’t breathing at all.

“You okay?” Ly asked as he waved his hand in front of my face.

“You know I am!” I replied as I broke my concentration and turned to smile at him.

“Good.” He smiled back as he let out a slight chuckle. “Well, I’ve got to go to a band practice,” Ly said as he slipped on the heavy winter jacket that he wore most of the year and began packing up his guitar.

“You sure you're okay?” he asked again as he held the neck of his guitar in his left hand, poised to place it in its hard-shelled, protective carrying case.

“Obviously,” I replied.

“So, I’ll see you at my show tonight?” he asked as he clicked shut his guitar case.

“Yes! Of course! I’ll be there! And with any luck, Elio will be there too!” I really hoped I wasn’t wrong about that statement. I desperately wanted to see Elio. To touch him; to feel him; to be reminded of his existence and how much his existence made my existence worth living.

Ly reached into the pocket of his jeans and handed me two more pills. “For later,” he said with a twitch of his eyebrows. “For when you get hungry.”

I thanked him and gently placed the pills on my coffee table so I would remember to take them before the show.

As he felt uncomfortable with physical contact, Ly and I developed a way of saying goodbye where we reached our hands longingly towards each other like Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling God touching, and thus imbuing life into, the limp body of the newly created Adam. We touched our fingertips together and allowed a resonating hum to expel from our mouths as though we were members of some devout church choir. We laughed and pulled our fingertips apart. Ly glided out the apartment door, waving his hand and espousing multiple “Goodbyes” and “See you soons.” I locked the door behind him and lit a cigarette, frantically puffing away at it.

I crushed out the cigarette and picked up a stick of compressed charcoal. As the desire for expression fully consumed me, I began furiously filling the large-scale, blank canvas with a portrait of Elio. I created this completely from memory. Which wasn’t hard, as I could vividly see him in my mind, and almost feel his presence next to mine. It was like we were one person, one soul that had been separated into two, and we were finally finding each other.

I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I wanted to convey that feeling in this artwork. Because in that moment, that feeling of love, desire, and attraction meant everything to me, and I didn’t want to lose it. I wanted to capture it and keep it trapped in a perfect visual memory that would live on well after I had passed.

So, I continued to draw, my hand rapidly moving across the cotton surface as I sought to capture the multitude of visual details that seemed to fade in and out of my altered imagination. Without fully realizing it, I had created a meticulously detailed, black-and-white rendering of Elio that seemed to stand before me as though it were real.

I took a step away from the drawing, lit a cigarette, and once again became lost in the creative potential that was Elio.