The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Leaving the Door Open

Contact 315 LeavingtheDoorOpen On Wednesday, May 24, 2006, at three o’clock in the afternoon, my life unexpectedly became a huge and shocking mess. Since then, it has gradually transformed into a small,slow-­burning chaos.“You should write about this,” my friend Testuya suggested the day I told him. I laughed.“What’s there to write? I’m HIV positive. It sucks. Then what?” Thinking about a chronic disease,I now feel I have written a text that is itself ill,like a mad book about confusion, and I’m tired. I imagined that with my life in shambles I’d fit at last into a chaotic world or, if this too failed, that there might be a chance at hand for me to move closer and about, without the fear of falling right into the gaps I’d been trying to bridge. But shreds and shards make for an odd sort of normalcy. Not a big surprise there, I guess, and I didn’t start this book in the hope that it would help me recapture some illusory cohesion or paradise lost I never possessed to begin with. What, I wondered, does it feel like to be HIV positive in a world at war? Uneventful is the answer. I have HIV and that’s that. Like the tiny tinny sound seeping from someone’s earphones as they listen to MP3s, with the voices screaming in one person’s ears all but inaudible to other people standing right next to them, I blend into the surrounding noise, not undetectable so much as undetected. So I’ll just turn in now, throw in the towel. I’ll leave the door open, though. Just because I prefer to stay at a distance doesn’t mean I’m out of sight or out of touch, quite the contrary. I won’t come out, but by all means let yourself in. Or, if you prefer, we can slow dance at the doorstep, sway with the sensuous rhythm and draw little circles as our bodies mingle and tangle ever more tightly to the music we make, cruising on a slow boat to China. ...