Alive

We were sitting at the Beverly Center, just outside the H & M store, having coffee and talking. And as we were talking about HIV and AIDS and the lack of impactful presence and communication in the gay community, we also came up with the same lack in the minority communities, especially 'straight' communities. So, we're talking. And we reach a point, again, when we're talking about when we're old, in our sixties, and honestly I'm not remembering the details of that, but we both made the observation that us making it to our sixties (and beyond) isn't out of the realm of possibility, the likelihood of it had grown a bit slimmer. I think it was me, pointing this out.

For a lot of the first year since I first discovered my own HIV infection, my greatest fear was that I would automatically become sick, you know? I would be that sick best friend in a sitcom, in a hospital room, hooked up to machines, looking sallow and my skin would be as thin as rice paper. I spent months crying and not sleeping well because it felt as if when I would wake up the next day I'd open my eyes and I'd have a tube up my nose. My doctor, then, said this is what would happen, and I didn't want to believe him despite his experience. And now, in retrospect, as I've said to Corey before, I can sort of chuckle about it because, well, my doctor was dead on, and I, of course, am not in some hospice somewhere, immobile and dying.

But that's just it, isn't it? Corey and I have gotten into a bit of a habit of making jokes about us "having AIDS" and us "dying" and us being sick. And we laugh. I've said to him how funny it sounds to me when I say something and his response is he's dying. Maybe you have to be there. Anyway, so why do we make the jokes? I mean, we're not with one foot in the grave as they say. That's what my doctor, then, would say to me. And it's the cliche we hear that once HIV infection appears, it's not a "death sentence" but Corey and I make jokes and comments to the contrary.

So, we're talking, drinking our coffee, laughing and all, and I point out we may not reach to live our sixties. I say how the odds are against us reaching that age. I'm not dismissing the possibility that we could. It's the likelihood that I latched on to. Corey details for me some more of what he saw and heard at and HIV training workshop last Sunday, and something reminds me of something I've come to realize about me over the last three years or so. After so much fright and so much worrying in that initial year, I said to Corey, I think there's going to come a time when my illness will more than show, whether it is through the damage it'll do to my body, or if I do indeed end up in a hospital bed until the end. I've come to accept the possibility of that. I don't think I've reached any grand zenith of self-realization, but I'm trying to keep a sort of realistic perspective on it.

Corey, since the very beginning, has been the person I can talk to about being HIV positive (the phrase 'living with HIV' is so much more passive and inert and ridiculous), but it was the first time I articulated to him this thought. Yes, we can joke around about telling some social services person we need help because we have AIDS, but I'd not brought up before the idea that, yes, we could be in fact dying of AIDS. But I'm not all gloom. I mean, what I think I have allowed into my life is that the possibility for the opposite of living is present, and not in a fatalistic nor negative way. I think the realization of that is something that we shy away from. Even from when I was a kid, through the sex education classes, through college, and through the real world, I never once heard that, hey, you know, being HIV/AIDS positive raises the incidence for premature death, so, keep that in mind. Why don't we tackle that, why don't we hear that?

Look, I'm not saying we should linger on the more sinister aspects of being HIV positive, that's just unhealthy and morbid and really rather strange. But I don't think we should discount what it probably means for a lot of us. I know I'm not the only one. I think it's okay to accept, or recognize the presence of one last final emergency in our lives (hell, we all say a lot of time that we could get hit by a bus tomorrow!). I'm going to take my last pill of the day, watch a few more episodes of the same tv show on dvd I watch, and get up and clean house, and talk to my boyfriend and kiss him.

I'm alive, after all.