In July he’s beautiful…
beyond what I’d known,
beckoning behind me,
breathlessly below me,
and he’s blatantly blessed my insides;
benevolently and becomingly.
Less than 2 weeks ago and he was harrowing…
having hazed our harmonation
when he hollered he’d rather have
HIV than herpes simplex.
The lilting listing of letters STOPS
as I’m overwhelmed to trembling
at hearing the sentence uttered within my lifetime,
let alone with such a haunting sense of longing.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
I want to scream. Want to shake him.
Want to slap him for such a blasphemous confession.
But I hold him close as I shiver
and he whispers about pills and stigma,
outbreaks and misconceptions,
the men (plural) who’ve rejected him,
and the men (plural) who’ve accepted him
since his November 2017 infection.
His illness merely scares me but
his promiscuity terrifies me;
I am nothing if not a child of the AIDS pandemic.
He was amazing when he was inside of me back in July.
I even dreamed of a life spent together. The three of us, I mean.
But he wanted someone all his own
and so he never stopped looking:
in Seattle, Canada, Hawaii or New York City.
He tells me that he was in my place years before
and our symmetry stuns me all the more.
I pull him on top of me,
my legs wrapped around him,
as I whisper in his ear about our blissful summer night
and how I thought I’d scared him away
with my longing for a life together.
He silences my tears with his own silent weeping;
his voice shattering into a broken child’s quivering
as he tells me that I’m not to blame;
that it was he who frightened himself away.
Fear defines his every action;
tinges the edges of every decision…
I hear it in his voice and I know that he speaks the truth.
There is no pre-exposure prophylaxis to be taken for this unease.
He leaves us,
naming us blameless
and yet there is blood on my hands…
For although we remain in the land of the uninfected,
none of us could ever be classified as clean.
Written by Jason Wright
February 13, 2018