Emergence

I rush to my apartment through the gray chilly air, my hair an uncombed bird’s nest and crumbs of sleep sticking to the corners of my eyes. I leave P. in his warm bed, emerging from his own web of dreams. I need to write, I need the outlet. I wake up the snoozing computer from energy saving mode, and click on my name to re-enter windows. I click on the Word icon in the Start menu. It takes several long seconds to respond. I can’t get there fast enough.

In the last days I have not been writing in this blog, because I needed the interaction and response of others. I posted a question, a query, a plea on my blog and in the web forum I frequent, “Love and Hurt”. I got no responses on my blog, mainly because very few people read it. I got some responses on the forum. One of the disadvantages of the forum is that most of the time I am forced to use English there, which is not the language of the portal or the people that use it. As a result I sometimes get flamed and bashed. But most of the time I am amazed by the reactions I get and the discussions I generate, despite the use of a foreign language. So I cried. I cried with the relief of letting it all out, I cried with the release of having strangers see my inside. I will copy and paste some of the interactions later.

There are quite a few people that write me privately. These can be friends, but also people I never met and even people whose first names I don’t know and they don’t know my own. There is the Old Toad who writes every day, and I always take the time to answer, knowing how poor and desolate he is, and now also knowing that I probably infected him to top it off… but many times he has helped me too, in his broken English and offbeat outdated quote-book collocations. There were many a time that his Buddhist take on life, his inner peace and accepted have shown me the way when it was too dark or, adversely, when too many distracting lights were blinking and flashing, blinding me into erratic shallow breath.

I am a Wailing Wall and a sounding board to some people, and they are for me. It is not always HIV-related, or it starts off as a HIV topic and transcends elsewhere into the realms of pain and experience, hope, want, fear. Into the fibers of our existence. And as I write and they write, our neurons fire, our brain parts are activated as we scan through endless networks of lexical items to express that pressing emotion that fills our bodies, raises our blood pressure, cramps the backs of our necks. And when the right words are found – which is of course completely objective – we feel a release not unlike the release of orgasm which is just the letting go of an accumulation of tension, or the momentous euphoria that comes after a long jog or bicycle ride. For a moment, we are set free. But unlike sex of sport (or binging or drug addiction), there is something else that this writing generates, there is a process of change set in motion which alters us, so that the next time we are slightly different when we encounter the same situation, whether inner or external.

As I write here I find that it is increasingly difficult to limit myself to things that won't reveal my identity. Already if someone I know stumbled across this page and read it carefully they would know who I am. At some point I will have to stop. Maintain my privacy. But not yet. It's a compulsion. It's keeping me afloat. I have taken to writing in Word first and then extracting what I am comfortable with to this webpage, which is not the purpose of this blog for me at all, I mean, to be blunt, it was supposed to be the plastic tub next to the bed I would heave into once in a while. But I can't be too risque (risque! ha ha... I always wanted to use that word, it is a sexy cheesy Danielle Steele/Jackie Collins type of word, like allure, and evokes assosiations of daytime encounters in hotels, sunglasses crossing through the lobby and skincolored stockings and beige raincoats).