Live by the sword, die of complications resulting from a retroviral infection in the lymphatic system

A filthy horror visits me tonight, clawing at my insides like a rat in so much garbage. The rat of AIDS tunnels through my gut and bursts out into the night, as the wind howls into the exit wound it seems to whisper "you will die..."

The first thing people say to you when you're worried you have HIV, is "go and get tested." They say this from their unassailable tower of heterosexual monogamy or their lifestyle of "never looked at someone without a condom on." It's a useless statement and the unspoken message is "better you than me." What they may see as going to the doctor and having some blood drawn is less than half the picture. Understand that the testing itself is terrifying.

To call the doctor is to ask someone to tell you that you're going to die. The waiting room is the slow approaching menace of the death row execution, jiggling your legs won't make anything better but it's all you can do. The blood is taken and then you wait and wait and wait and wait. In your mind, already you are dead, the virus is inside and its work has begun. The blood becomes bad news, and now what comfort you may have found in fantasies of it being something else are gone. It's real now, unavoidable, inescapable, incurable.

When I get this way I always think how it isn't fair...as if karma actually worked, as if the fact that "I'm not a bad person" has anything to do with anything. I want so desperately to believe in a magic god I can pray to, so he'll appear in my house and say "you don't have HIV. Go to sleep now, Farrell everything will be alright." I want to believe that I'm okay and not trapped in my own flesh, a skinless helpless puppy in a toxic deadly world.

"Get tested" you say, what I need to do first is prepare myself for death.