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

Old Friends, New Friends

38 Diagnosis OldFriends,NewFriends Is my HIV-­ positive body the same body I always had, only with HIV in it? Early on, I did feel invaded, inhabited, but no longer. Now the experience is more akin to a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. Do I have a different body, then—­ a body with HIV that is somehow not the same as a body without HIV? Or perhaps HIV is a supplement to my body, in the Derridean sense of the term,that is,an addition that also signals some foundational absence? This all depends on whether one considers the different stages of one’s life to form a succession of events linked by an underlying narrative (whether revealed in hindsight or knowingly imitative) or, instead, revolutions that alter life’s course in a radical and unpredictable way, forcing us to start all over again each time. Truth is, it’s both. If we see life as the relations that take place in it, then I can think, for example, of the old friends, the ones I made before anything out of the ordinary happened in my life, but also of the friends I made after I came out (as gay). Then there are the friends I made after I left for America and the friends I made after a very long relationship ended. Now there are the friends I made after HIV. Each set of friends feels somehow attached to a new self, unannounced and impossible for the earlier self to conceive because each is entirely made possible by and contained within a specific circle of friends. Yet my obsolete, discarded selves never really went away. They keep haunting the ones that have come after. I wish I could be friends with my old selves, but they’re like family, and I’m afraid we don’t communicate very well. ...