Do chapters ever really close? Some people probably keep the door cracked open —just in case — while others bind it shut under lock and key. For myself, I’m closing a very momentous chapter of my life: that with my partner. I was planning to build a life with this person, so the divorce feels like I’ve uprooted my self and set it adrift down the river. Such is the risk, reward and subsequent rebirth of entangling your life with another.
As I’ve said many times before, when poz people uproot anything significant in their lives, HIV glints in the furrows of the upended soil.
My partner was neg. Though I knew that sero-discordant couples existed, I assumed that my plentiful non-conformist spirit along with my status would relegate my life to one of monastic deference.
But what’s the nature of that thought anyway? Intellectually, it’s nonsense. But emotionally, it’s an immortal foe.
Springtime is upon us. All is abloom and good and growing as the earth is celebrating rebirth. But for some reason, even when all rises from the grave, life can feel like a black hole, where all seen is sorrow and all gained is fleeting.
Being newly single with HIV is by far the greatest challenge I’ve faced in a long time. In a way, it beats the challenge of my diagnosis. Maybe I adopted an archaic sense of romance in this relationship, where I sacrificed part of my person to wed my life with another. And so, when a schism happens, I’m suddenly bereft of that side of myself, bound to another, that makes life greater than the sum of its parts.
Maybe it’s intuitive to other people, but I’ve never allowed my friends to take care of me when I’m emotionally incapacitated. When I got HIV, I tried to be brave; I told all of my friends and family about my status; threw myself into my work to prove I exist; chose hyper-activity over the profound emptiness that comes with great loss. I sought to manually jumpstart my rebirth, and live as the paragon of optimism I always wanted to be.
And it worked, as it always has. Such masculine resolve always made me feel like I was a hero, and that I didn’t need anyone else. But this time, I was helpless.
Then my friends reminded me that I am my friends. The concept of the Aaron Stella I had in my head was but one of many conceptions of everyone I’ve ever met. Humility and peace come when you validate and accept all of those conceptions as real — for better or for worse.
I am Aaron Stella: Aaron Stella with HIV; Aaron Stella with millions of organisms vying for life in his body; Aaron Stella who is kind to others; Aaron Stella who is cruel to others; Aaron Stella who wants to exist; Aaron Stella who wants to vanish; Aaron Stella who seeks to romance hearts to luminous wonders; Aaron Stella locked in his cavernous deep.
Even with the pride of living courageously despite my status, I feel like I’m toting a heavy pack. I have trouble separating my diseased state from the life I could’ve had with my partner: building communities together, sharing in each other’s joy and sorrow, becoming stronger as time passes and being a pillar of support for others.
But how can I do it for anyone else if I can’t do it for myself? Such a simple concept, yet so difficult to apprehend in the breadth of darkness. Ah, hell. I’ve never been daunted by the dark wall of the devil, and I’m not about to start now. Neither should you. We’re not dead yet, so we still have a chance.
I wonder about how I’ll feel about my status and myself many years from now. Through the experience of this breakup, I feel older. I’ve looked at the grotesque reflections of myself — my status, my cruelty, my spinelessness, my malice — and have said, “I accept. I love. I am myself. Now go forth!”
Silently out of the darkness, these anthems of self wash over us like water over the back of a newborn babe. At those moments, the hate in our hearts dissipates and we are empowered to be kind to others; no longer a slave to our endings, but a steward to our beginnings.
We’re all in this together, folks. Now get out and talk about it.
Aaron Stella is former editor-in-chief of Philly Broadcaster. Since graduating from Temple University with a bachelor’s degree in English, he has written for several publications in the city, and now devotes his life to tackling the challenges of HIV in the 21st century. Millennial Poz, which recently won first place for best column writing from the Local Media Association, appears in PGN monthly. Aaron can be reached at [email protected].