JUNE 23

Tomorrow is my anniversary. Funny how it sneaks up on me. I mean the anniversary of testing HIV-positive. It’s been nine years now, and on the surface I should be jubilant. I remember thinking way back then that I’d probably start to get really sick by the millennium, and that I’d be on disability by now. Instead, here I am, in a beautiful place with a great beagle and boyfriend, running a website, writing furiously, feeling great. My bloodwork just came back again from the doc and showed that my CD4 cell count (the rough measure of the health of my immune system) is actually higher than it was nine years ago. And I’ve been off medications for a whole year! It seems as if my own immune system is managing to keep the virus at bay on its own. It probably won’t last for ever, but it’s a huge blessing not to be on those debilitating, disfiguring drugs. At times it feels as if that whole era is a strange part of near history. The last friend who died was seven years ago. Here in Provincetown, once a war zone, you can feel life returning in full. And yet I always succumb to depression at this time. It’s totally unconscious. I have no conscious reason to feel blue. It’s as if my body remembers the impact of that awful news received at a time when it really felt like a death sentence, and today shudders at the memory. But perhaps my depression is about the guilt of surviving when so many didn’t, and in other parts of the world, aren’t. I can close my eyes now and see the faces of my young friends who died – forever young and hopeful. Their ghosts hover in this town – on the beach at sunset, in corners of bars, as the sunlight rises on shingles. My close friend, Patrick, died at 31. What conceivable justice is there in my having eight more years than he ever had? Man, I still miss him so much. And so, in some ways, I’m proud of my unconscious remembering. I might have careened on obliviously without that psychic, physical memory, sending me into melancholy, withdrawal, sleep. And it serves to remind me why the struggle for the dignity for gay men and women is in large part fueled by the bequest of these lost ones. They urge us forward as we look wistfully back. And then I realize this isn’t depression I feel. It’s just sadness. Sadness that they are not here any more, edged only by the faith that one day I will be with them once more. Until then,

Day draws near.
Another one.
Do what you can.