Saturday, February 7, 2015

HIV Positive/Coping

"What I want is to be needed." - Chuck Palahniuk



HIV Positive
A story by Surgeon Syringe

            “You’re HIV Positive.” said the Doctor. This is it. The end of the line. I was diagnosed with an incurable disease that would inevitably kill me in the future. My fate was set in stone. Yeah everyone dies, but I was dying faster than anyone else.
            “We’re all here for you.” My friends would endlessly tell me. My family starts giving more time for me. My co-workers finally stop giving me a hard time. In short, in the numbered days of my life, they’re making me into their king. Why? Just to look human. They think that pampering you and loving you through the final phases in your life redeems them from the pain and suffering they’ve caused you in the prior stages. They think that that one act of love redeems the thousand acts of selfishness they’ve done to you. I would be a liar if I said that I didn’t like it, but even that fades over time. When they think they’ve done enough, they stop doing it. Even my family does a little less every day.
            Learning you have HIV is like having a gun to your head. Not knowing when it will fire. You won’t know when you’re time’s up until your lungs stop failing. Even the medications that extend my life seem to cost so much for just a little more time. Time is gold; don’t waste it because it costs just as much to get it. I tried calling my girlfriend. She was, of course, the first to know. But after telling her that I had HIV, she screamed, she was hysterical, and she hung up on me. We never talked since then. The truth is, I don’t know how I got AIDS. Maybe I got it from some dirty syringe, or maybe some drink I shared with someone who had it. It doesn’t really matter where it came from. The bottom line is that I’m dying.
            The worst part of dying is becoming a statistic. To know that you’re just another number among the records of HIV Deaths in some piece of paper in a company that could really care less about you. I call my health care company, and they said that they can only help me buy the meds, and not cure me from HIV. They thought that I was that stupid to look for them for a cure. Well, the truth is, I’ve given up on hoping for a cure. I was going to die and my biggest regret was not claiming my humanity. I lived my life like another brick in the wall, doing what other bricks in the wall were doing. Each of those bricks thought they were some special snowflake or some unique flower. The truth is, we’re not. We’re not special. We all do the same things, eat the same food, live in the same planet. We all walk the same, talk the same, breathe the same. And one think ironically common in each of us is we all think we are unique. Through our search for uniqueness, we become hay in the haystack.  Cattle to the herd. We are not special. We are a splotch of white ink on a white wall. We are nothing new to this world. Because we think we are.

           The side effects of dying are pretty much the same with the side effects of my HIV meds. You get depressed, you stop talking to people, you get pretty much filled with spite every day of the remaining days of your life. My friends let me go because I’m not allowed to hang out with them. I’m forced to wear a face mask to work. No one wants to touch me, and there’s a veil between me and whoever it is I’m talking to. Disgust is not the right word, but it’s the first that comes to mind. The food I eat, the water I drink, they start to taste a little less interesting every time. Is this what Robert Mapplethorpe felt? Is this what Freddie Mercury felt? Of course I can’t compare myself to them. Freddie Mercury left this world a genius. He left a mark. He left the single biggest mark any HIV Patient could ever leave. But what was my mark? My signature on some contract? My test papers, my text messages, my phone calls? That’s not a mark. That’s a blotch. A mark we can do without. The only thing that justifies my existence now is the fact that everyone wants to wash their hands or get checked after passing by me. It’s like having a dark cloud of HIV looming over my head.
            It can’t really be helped. HIV is still something to be scared about because of the hysteria around it. And there’s this social stigma that follows along with having HIV. Everyone looks at you and thinks of how you got it. But they always come to two conclusions. Either I’m gay and got it from some guy, or I’m an unlucky sap who got it from a girl. Either way, they’re humiliating enough to be labeled as either. One thing about getting HIV is that everyone thinks it’s always sex. Well, it isn’t. It’s just the hype over it that they stereotype the disease. Like Lung Cancer from Smoking, Brain cancer from exposure to radiation. The world loves to simplify things to one source so that there’s an instant explanation when faced with it. That’s why feminists are always fighting some patriarchal crap. To create diversity in meaning of things. Things ought not to be very linear, but the world makes it to be so.
            When you have HIV, you’re also a mini-celebrity. HIV is like the Cadillac of diseases. Expensive, audacious, and sure enough, it’ll kill you at some point. Everyone wants to know about how you’re feeling, what you’re experiencing, what changed when you got the disease. All I tell them is that you just start counting the days you’ve lived since you learned you had it. The more days you get to count, the more days you get to add to your list.
            As an HIV positive individual, you tend to be an individual. What I mean is you are a social outcast. People look at you different, treat you different and they definitely see you differently. There are support groups that help you cope with the isolation, but even they just meet once a week. Even the people that once loved you to your core look at you like a monster. Maybe it’s because of what they think you’ve done to get the disease, or maybe it’s just that they don’t want the disease for themselves. Some people are still hopeful that they’ll eventually be accepted, but in the end they just get disappointed. There are many people in my support group that live alone, void of contact with their families and lovers. The isolation kills them, but there’s nothing they can do, it follows having HIV. There are some people who sit idly by, letting their remaining humanity waste away in the trash bin of forgotten statistics. I wanted to change something, and I wasn’t going to sit and wait.
            So I sat alone in my empty apartment, which bustled with the romantic language of partners in deep affection, now house an empty soul, quiet and alone. What was I to change about me? What was I to change to make my mark on the world? Then it hit me. I wasn’t going to change myself. I was going to change the way people looked at the disease. And so I thought of a plan that would do so, and would be virtually risk-free for me. And when I concocted my plan, I was to execute it in the most definitive way possible.
            When you’re dying, you are at the mercy of God. He chooses when you die, and you have this sense of helplessness in the idea. And when you’re helpless, you have this undying urge to feel superior, for one last time to somebody. Someone who doesn’t have AIDS, someone with a girlfriend, someone with a loving family. Yeah, I maybe at God’s mercy, but who’s stopping me from trying to be Him? And that’s my mark, my anonymous mark. My Stonehenge, my Nazca Lines. I wanted to change how they see the disease by giving it to someone without knowing that they did. Maybe then, they can see that AIDS isn’t a sex disease; it’s not a disgusting venereal foul disease that people get from sex. I wanted to show them how easy it was to get it.
            I bought a syringe from the local drugstore. And the next I needed was my blood sample. I stuck the needle in and sucked it full. Then I canvassed places where people hung around most, meaning the most crowded places in the city. Then I chose the go-to for students in my city, the most crowded place because of its cheap books, and cheaper merchandise. I put on a shirt, and some shades, and I was ready to change the world. As my final act, the last masterpiece of my life. This is my Fermat’s Last Theorem. This is my Mozart’s Requiem, my Ode to Joy.
            Walking along the street, I saw some unsuspecting girl. She was in College, perhaps, and she was a worthy target. I started following her, and then I walked ahead of her. When she was busy with her phone, I turned around, walked against her direction, and stuck that needle in her arm. Along with the note that said “Welcome to the HIV world”. My masterpiece was finished. The canvas had been smeared with paint. My final message to the world, and she was at my mercy. In a flash, her life spiraled down in a downward trajectory. And she would experience the isolation I’ve had. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll finally speak up and say that she didn’t get this disease from having sex, and she’ll speak up on her struggles, and she’ll be a light of hope for those with HIV. Because if I can’t change the world, maybe her encounter will. I hope she changes the world and sees it as an opportunity to remove the stigma that walls HIV to the rest of the world. I may not live long enough to see this, but I hope that she remembers the anonymous villain, the masked devil, that gave her the disease and made her into the advocate she is now. The End Justifies The Means isn’t the right phrase, but it’s the first that comes to mind.


Hey guys! It's been a while since my last short story, but here it is! I drew inspiration from a real-life story I saw on Facebook. I wanted people to sympathize with the villain, and I drew inspiration from Chuck Palahniuk's book Haunted, which immediately became my favorite book. I've been struggling with depression lately, but I channel it through my writing. 

"And maybe it's our job to build something better." - Chuck Palahniuk

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