Brendan's Diagnosis

It’s Easter 2000 and Meryl Streep is dying of cancer. William Hurt, her estranged husband, is giving an Oscar worthy speech about the virtues of their love. My boyfriend and I are in bed and we’re crying. Meryl withers and twists into the sheets of her hospital bed, her body a gnarled memory where there once was flesh.
My boyfriend whispers, "That’s not going to be me."
I whisper back, "It won’t, I know it."
But I can’t be sure. The virus is alive in his blood, exciting every nerve and casting a net of doom across his body, see-sawing between the threat of sickness and the hope of health.
"I’m a statistic, I never wanted to be a statistic," I remember him saying 2 months earlier, when his blood still tingled with the news of infection.
I didn’t know how to respond and so I mumbled, "Try to stay positive."
And he said, "That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid."
In sickness and in health. These are the words I told myself when he was diagnosed, although there’d been no ceremonies or vows shared between us. I wasn’t going to flee, although the temptation almost always pulled at my feet and taunted me to safety.
Around the same time, my father did flee. He left my mother, their 32 year marriage and our family. My sister and I felt it coming, but that anticipation did not prepare us for the anger and absence that’s taken permanent residence in our souls. We saw the signs, even though my mother hadn’t. She’d grown blinded by the resentments that build between people who forget to infuse the architecture of their relationship with human hearts. All that stood now was an empty wooden structure where a marriage was once founded. I wasn’t going to let this happen to me and Brendan.
In sickness and in health, I said it again and again until I achieved dream like trances in my waking hours. When I slept the trances where full-fledged epics – symbols of my life and where I’d wound up. I’d dream that I was hovering above our bed, my troubled sleep in sharp contrast to the dreamless nights he’d begun to have. He stopped dreaming when he was diagnosed, a black sleep that offered no fantasy of hope or healing, but also of no doom.
My dreams where vivid. I was always flying - but with one caveat – my feet and hands were bound by twine or fabric and always threatened to unravel. If they did, I’d plummet to the earth. Despite this threat, I’d tempt the gods and soar higher, moving silently from our bed to the places I’d been in my life – my boyhood home, my ementary school, Lake George, New Hampshire, Maine, The Village, 8th Avenue, the cars I’ve fooled around in, other men’s beds, my own empty bed before I’d met Brendan. I’d fly past Mrs. Dubini, the neighborhood grump, who once took my bike and gave me the finger. I flew past Donna Pertrillo who threatened to beat me up in the second grade and whom I avoided by running through neighbors backyards and hiding in bushes because I didn't want to be exposed as a sissy when she finally caught up to me. I passed my elementary school where I was the designated faggot. Brendan has that story too. But where my story stopped with words, his stopped with rocks. I fly past him too, a skinny young boy being stoned by the class bullies who taunted him because he wore yellow pants to school –- sticks and stones break more than bones.
I hover over a hotel room in the Bahamas and see Brendan's mother, a retired nurse, telling me, "My son's a good boy so don't you cheat on him. You know what's out there." I wanted to respond, "It's already in here. And he's still a good boy." Brendan's one fear, other than dying, was his mother finding out his HIV status and retracting the love he'd worked so hard to obtain.
"You'd think I would have known better, my mother being a nurse," He'd say over and over again when he was first diagnosed.
In the beginning, "Yes," was my only response.
I hover over the clinic in Yonkers I’d sat in the week after Brendan’s diagnosis. The clinic was once the building where I attended Sunday School. I was a challace bearer. It comforted me being there - the ghost of a previous life saddling up to my current one. I see the nurse taking my blood and telling me, "My husband doesn’t like gay people, but I have no problem with them."
Them.
I wanted to say, "Hey, I’m one of "them" remember, bitch?" Instead, I said nothing.
Meryl Streep is still dying on TV. I wish I could press rewind and watch her regain health, watch her marriage unifiy instead of divide, see the bud of the flower before it blossomed. But that is just a fantasy.
In the beginning of my relationship with Brendan, I always wished for the rewind. I wished for restored health and unbroken unions and of flying with no boundaries -- no bindings to rub me raw. I wished for no fear of infection when touching can lead to so much more. Through sickness and health, and divorce, and the little deaths that reside in the darkest corners of the soul, I wished for it all to stop because we were so fucking scared. Every once in a while there was hope. You can't live on hope alone though, but I banked on that to sustain us. Sometimes just living felt like a losing hand and other days it was a jackpot of small victories and tiny explosions.
I reach for the remote and press pause – knowing that I can’t go back, but wishing for it to stop, if even for a moment. I lean over and place a kiss on B’s forehead, an offering of hope and health to the gods or angels, or whoever is watching over us.