The Things in February

February 2000. I remember this month, this year. My first boyfriend calling me. I always call him my "first" boyfriend. I haven't had a second. "I'm coming up, tonight." He sounded concerned. He put our other friend on the phone. He was coming, too. And a third friend, his roommate, Lisa, our den-mother/lover of the gays. I said to my roommate, "Something's up." She said, "It's just silly boys having fun." I wanted to believe her. She was a resident, doing a rotation at St. Vincent's in the HIV/AIDS wing. My next door neighbor was a doctor too, she worked at an AIDS service organization in San Francisco. Me, I'm gay, and have been petrified of HIV since I was 12 years old.

I went back to work -- the late shift at the TV Station, creating graphics for a shitty local newscast - we routinely misreported deaths and boasted a news team of several of the ugliest people assembled in the history of television production. Our weatherman was often mistaken for a dwarf -- something about the distance between his eyes (too wide) and his arms (too short)that fooled people. He could get a finger up to the knuckle into his nose. He never knew I was looking.

All shift I wondered who was right, me or my roommate. The week prior, my boyfriend had won a magazine cover model contest at The Web, a gay bar/dance club that caters to Asian gay boys and the men who appreciate them. The magazine shoot was in a week. Exciting and silly. On the phone that same week he said, "Everything is so perfect right now. There's you, and I got a full-time job and I won the contest..but I don't know." I heard regret. "It sounds like you're expecting the bottom to drop out." I remember saying that. And it did. I've never thought it was just coincidence that he knew the bottom was crumbling. Sometimes I think it's why I was there -- to slap cement between the cracks that threatened to destroy any semblance of the "okay" he'd worked so hard to achieve.

My shift ended and I met my friends and boyfriend at the Metro North, a stones throw from my apartment in Hastings-on-Hudson. It's snowing. I make tea. My boyfriend asks to see me alone and we step into my bedroom. I painted it a luscious periwinkle. Even the ceiling. It's gorgeous. Everybody says so. It's like we're under water, always. Swimming, floating. Losing ourselves beneath the surface, trapped in beauty.

"I had a test."
He had a test. A test. The test.
"And the results were not good. "

It was his second test that week. The first was inconclusive. When you test positive they do another test to make sure it wasn't a false positive. That sometimes happens. He found out it was a positive positive earlier that night. He screamed at the woman who gave him the news.

We sat for a while. Silent. Motionless. What do you say? Sorry never works. We stood up. We played Fiona Apple, "...hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
Cuz I know Im a mess he don't wanna clean up, I got to fold cuz these hands are too shaky to hold, hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love.."
And we swayed in each other's arms, cried. He thought it was a parting dance. It wasn't.

Silence.
Bu-bump.
Silence.
Bu-bump.
Hearts beating.
Me: "What are you going to do?"
Him: "I can jump off a bridge. Or I can fight."
I think about the HIV test I'll set up first thing in the morning. I'm fucking scared. He's looking out the window. I lived along the Hudson River at the midpoint between The George Washington Bridge and The Tappan Zee. The midpoint between oblivion and hope. Always, then. For him, always now.

We start to drown in the blue of the room. Blue. Real blue. Deep. It's snowing. Blue room. White snow. I drive them home to 15th Street. White blankets under smoldering metal. Tires crunching down leaving covered tracks as we fade into an oblivion. We'll fade in and out for some time. For some years. I hoped I'd find my way back.

February 2008. This month, 8 years later, stepping off the 7 train, I cried again, harder than the first night. I step into an alley. I'm close to home but I can't imagine trying to walk triumphantly into my building with tears staining my face. My stride might say, "I wasn't crying," but every thing else about me would belie that, make me a liar. I imagine the entire building staring at me until I scream, "It's about my ex-boyfriend, I don't want him to get AIDS. Fuck you. Do you even get wishing for that to never happen? Do you even know what he's been through?" Of course, there's nobody to say this to, but the imaginary peanut gallery in my head. I think about him and about what he has survived. What we survived when we made a go at it. There's bravery and hope in all of this. There was then, there is now. And even though I didn't know it then, in those early weeks of our relationship, there was love. Ugly, brutal. Unresolved. And it was love.