The guy didn’t seem too good
If he messages me, can I give him your number?
His name is Ian
I stare at the screen, processing the information.
“Aw, how cute, he thought of you! At least this one didn’t run away to New Zealand for years and pretend you never existed.” Eric smiles. “What are you going to say?”
“That I don’t want my status to be on the evening news,” I answer, but before I can say more, Eric rips the phone out of my hand and starts typing.
Henrique:
Sure.
If you want to talk about us, I’m here.
I’m glad the test came back negative.
At this stage of the game, Eric’s meddling in my personal life isn’t a nuisance anymore. And honestly, I even like it when he plays Cupid and replies to messages on my behalf, because most of the time I say it’s not worth pursuing something that won’t work out in the end. He says that’s just my negativity speaking and that if I at least put in some effort, things could be different.
“He knows about the window period, right?” Eric asks. He has learned so much about HIV from me, either from my endless conversations on the subject or from his research during the first months of my diagnosis, when he tried to show me through graphs, charts, and stats that I was not going to die anytime soon.
“Probably not, but he could have researched it. And I already said I took all necessary precautions, as I always do. And that I’m undetectable, which means—”
“The chance of transmitting the virus is effectively zero,” Eric says automatically, a bored tone in his voice. He’s heard me talk about it at least two hundred times. “Now you want to preach to the choir?”
“I think there’s nothing else I can teach you that you don’t already know, young Padawan,” I say. Eric ignores my comment and presses play on his makeup tutorial.
I stare at Victor’s message, wondering if he’s worth the trouble or if I should let him go.
He did respond, even if he didn’t talk directly about the two of us, and that’s already more than most guys do. Most of them believe that silence is the best medicine, but in reality, it messes with my emotions more than any antiretroviral ever could.
WHEN I GET HOME, I’M met with pure silence. There are papers strewn about the dining room table—engineering blueprints my mom brings home from work—and a coffee-stained mug that for some reason she didn’t put in the sink. A photo of the whole family (me, my mom and dad, and my younger sister) sits atop a small table near the TV; it’s the only picture we posed for during our trip to João Pessoa. There’s a note from Mom underneath the frame that says she and Dad will be home late and asks me to make dinner for myself and my sister, who’s still at school.
Crying in front of that stranger was embarrassing, but at least it seems to have removed something bad from my system. I let out an exhausted breath, throw my backpack on a chair, open the fridge, and swig a drink of water straight from the bottle. I open the vegetable drawer and take out some broccoli, an eggplant, and an onion. From the shelf above it, I grab a package of unseasoned chicken cutlets. I open the pantry, pull out a bag of brown rice, and start boiling some water. I do it all automatically and wonder if that old saying—that food made with love tastes better—is true. If so, this dinner won’t be a very good one.
I don’t want to think about HIV, but the three letters dance relentlessly in front of me, reminding me there’s something inside my body that shouldn’t be there and that, little by little, is destroying me. It’s hard not to think about death when it’s running through your veins.
I cut the eggplant into thin slices and the broccoli into small florets, and when I start dicing the onion, the knife slips in my hand and digs into my fingertip, letting a small trickle of blood stain the vegetable red.
One look at the wound, and my stomach churns. Ignoring the burning sensation running up my hand, I drop the knife and grab a paper towel, pressing it against my finger as I watch my blood dissolve into the white layers of the half-chopped onion.
I pull a chair behind me and sit down, and my eyes start stinging—not because of the onion but from sadness.
Is this what my life is going to be like from now on? Taking care not to shed even a single drop of blood so others will never come into contact with this virus that lives inside me, killing me bit by bit? Is this what I am now, a walking HIV container, about to infect anyone who comes near me?
The tears running down my face are born of anger and frustration, because I know I can no longer ignore the fact that I’ve hurt myself. I can’t just go back in time to redo those nights when I didn’t use condoms and slept with guys I didn’t even know, whom I will never see again.
I’m disgusted by myself. Disgusted by my memories and the things I’ve done to get to this point. They say that when you’re diagnosed with HIV, it’s not supposed to be about guilt or blame or fault, but that’s all I feel right now. Guilt for being stupid, for allowing myself to get caught up in the heat of the moment, for having to carry inside me this thing that no one can remove.
I wait for my finger to stop bleeding, then throw the onion in the trash. I snatch the knife that cut me and toss it in the boiling water that was going to cook the rice, all the while knowing it’s irrational. I want to sterilize the knife, the onion, the cutting board—my own body. I want to drink this pot of boiling water so it can burn away the virus inside me, but I know that’s impossible.
It’s pointless to cry, but I can’t stop.
It’s useless to rehash these thoughts, but that’s all I can do.
It’s hopeless to think that my life won’t be different, because that’s exactly what it will be.
I wish it didn’t have to.
+
The following days are a mess, especially because I need to make excuses to justify my coming and going at unusual hours.
The dynamics at home are a little different from traditional families: Adriana, my mom, works extremely odd hours and has meetings left and right all over Rio de Janeiro and sleepless nights during which she draws, calculates, and revises plans for civil engineering briefs. Right now she’s working on three different blueprints, and the dark circles under her eyes are proof that she is way too tired. William, my dad, is more resistant to sleep deprivation and sleeps between four and five hours a night. He teaches math at three different schools in addition to being a math tutor on weekends to help make ends meet, which just barely affords us the overpriced luxury of living near the subway in Rio’s Botafogo district, in a tiny two-bedroom apartment. Vanessa, my sister, goes to school in the mornings and to a college prep course in the afternoons, and when she’s not out, she buries her face in her biology textbooks, committed to her dream of getting into medical school.
“Do you have class today?” my mom asks when she sees me at seven a.m., filling my backpack with things I won’t actually be using that day. It’s Thursday, and I don’t have class on Thursdays.