My winter disaffection

On the back porch two nights ago, looking at the sunset, I entered adulthood. I'd watched the gray tufted birds peck at the squirrel food I placed in a bowl on the picnic table, watched the dog sniff about the backyard for traces of the rabbits who love to visit in the dark, for signs of Earl the Opossum to emerge from under the porch next door. I watched a patch of world I've come to know well during the past three years.\nWithout warning, without predisposition, I realized I was ready to leave this world, and with that feeling I became an adult. \nNo longer did I carry the panic of things undone, places unseen. The mental argument wasn't that I haven't seen the Great Wall or the Christ of Rio. \nIn the growing dark of the backyard, I faced the fact that three years have gone by in this place, all filled with pill-taking, all filled with vigilance, all ending each 24 hours in fatigue. I faced the fact that without definition, without the evidence to convince, without you reading this with your own HIV, you could never understand any of it. \nI knew that you couldn't see from my eyes, feel trapped as I feel, fight each day to not give in -- that for so many of you life is not an eternal battle ... or if it is, it is a battle of good versus evil, not cell versus cell. \nI became an adult when I knew I did not love HIV, did not love the changes it has brought, did not want to pick up my chemical guns another day more. When everyday in crowds of twenty-somethings I see the faces of dead twenty-somethings I used to know. You might think the dead are frozen memories, but they aren't -- they reappear ad nauseam, they flit from expression to expression. They are poltergeists of the eyes, vapid and dismissive of physical law. They never stay dead. \nWhen I dream, I go to places that can't be found on Earth, and for the best reason of all -- in those dreams there is no failing body, and there is no limit to my energy. Oddly, I don't ever recall having sex in a dream; I guess I don't miss my sexual life as much as you might think. \nI became an adult realizing that my anger is a good thing for me. Each time I almost rear-end some idiot who stops traffic on Third Street to pick someone up, each time I curse the vulgar selfishness of such an act, I live longer, harder and I live more. That anger that propels me through Kroger's while some fat jerk hogs an aisle examining dog food options just determines my next moment -- I live in spite of the base, inward-looking humanoids around me. \nI see the face of that anger, and it sometimes astonishes me. I can smell it. I feel the heart clench, the teeth pressed hard, the tenseness -- and it's all me. It's not the damn virus. I swear you couldn't find it in my bloodstream at those moments. \nI abhor the idea that expressing or feeling such an emotion is entirely negative. Why? When it's the one time I know I'm alive, I won't have it taken away.\nI wish to live in peace and write of love, and I experience both of those vastly more than anger. The great boundary that I see after this life is the dropping of anger and the acquisition of something even better than love. \nI became an adult two nights ago when I understood that I have nothing terribly significant to say of anger or of love. That they are subsets beautifully intertwined in a Venn diagram somewhere in the constellation of my heart. \nI finally learned that I do not need to hang onto myself, that to preserve who I am in the face of what is happening to me makes me worse than the petty selfishness that I observe in the casual world. For three years, Mark has been an island behind a sea wall. Save Mark! Keep him whole! I built a thousand lighthouses, cast a thousand SOS signals to the wind and never received an answer. Possibly because all this time, I've been talking only to myself. \nI have watched my changes inevitably build to a loathing of change -- such that I finally know why change is difficult. A survivor of a shipwreck watches cargo float away, quietly bobbing out of reach. Currents separate survivor and survival; spirit determines the rest. \nIn the winter of my disaffection, I have grown up. I only want to save myself from making the mistakes that others have made. Those who have clawed the surface of the Earth to stay one more minute, see one last place, write the ultimate tale of their disintegration. To be lauded by a world in love with disaster, in love with the stories of failure available 24/7 on more than one cable channel. To be the grim face of possibility that this could happen to you!\nIn my adulthood, I have learned to hate HIV, to detest the sound of the word AIDS. I have plumbed the idea of explanation for both things and come up empty. I have excoriated my demons, blamed myself, looked beyond the world to anchor myself within it. I have defended the gay world, the gay men who won't die and leave me alone. Those flawed creatures I live with, in my blood stream, in my organs, unalterable and forever. \nI have spoken love and I meant each word, for anger is a love that isn't returned. One that cannot see within the space of its geography a reflection, a signal or a hope. I have kept the anger out of this column because I thought it was my failing. \nIn the winter of my disaffection, I have grown up.