“What’s your status?” he quietly asked, and somehow I knew he preferred poz/undetectable guys like myself, someone who knew his status and took care of himself. Turning around, I whispered in his ear, “Thank you … thank you.” The times are changing — not fast, but slow, like a river current emptying into the sea. The nation murmurs with conversation, phasing in and out of a cacophonous terrain, like topographies of sound across an echoing globe; hearts breaking and mending, ages passing. What we have between us is love. What we have is full of love. Every month, I battle out 750 words of defiant prose in hopes that I might make readers aware that we, the world, are at peace. But how can that be? From war to rape, trauma occurs every day, devastating lives, communities, economies and countries; attack them first before they attack us. A good offensive is a good defensive. But I’m going to lower my guard. I’m going to open up my heart. The traumas won’t cease, I know, but peace will be ours. Come. Come and share this peace with me. It has been here all along. The life of the embattled heart — if you have such a life, eking out pleasurable moments between seasons of strife, please, believe with me a moment that peace is here; that no matter what happens — whoever injures or is injured, kills or is killed, defiles or is defiled — engrave into your purpose today a viral peace, and let it sweep across your body, mind and heart. For I, in love with all-of-us-everything-working-together, say “I love you. I love you”; for I, in love with all-of-us-everything-working-together, say, “no matter what, you will always be beautiful and meaningful”; for I, in love with all-of-us-everything-working-together, praise you all for being here, and making me and the world who we are. So what is your HIV? A criminal charge? A deadly force? An indelible mark on your forehead that tarnishes any who pass the welcome mat of your ass, or the altar of your tongue or condemns covenants of “love you,” “love you,” “love you forever!” as windswept promises forged by the windy in their weakest of moments? If you say so, HIV can make all those things true. And maybe that’s exactly what HIV will be for you right now, perhaps for a long time. And that’s all right. Really. That’s all right. Peace is yours, my family. Just let yourself have it. Many people in the world are more comfortable with sadness than joy, with pain than comfort. The same can be said for entire nations of people, perhaps even worlds, galaxies, universes, dimension there and gone beyond the astral plane. And that’s OK. Did you know that that’s OK? Why bedevil pain and sorrow when they’re just as much teacher, enchanter and storyteller as joy? It’s part of the same journey, you know. So let yourself be OK with feeling pain, and if you can, don’t disguise it as anything else. Pain and joy breed happiness all the same. We go through equal shares of both, if you let yourself live seasonally; we can instigate self-global warming, you know, where no matter our true season or weather, the sun shines forth like a newborn babe on the horizon of the soul, and the earth is baptized over and over again in tears of denial, despair and caged sorrow. Let your chosen families give color to your autumn trees and snowfall to your somber winters. In sadness, call yourself “love” and be a light in the lives of others. Forgo the wish that you were someone else, or feeling some other way, and you won’t have to believe with me anymore that we, the world, are at peace. You’ll believe it yourself, and you’ll find a way to accept more than your HIV, but the world round — its history, the universe, the mystical body of the Self infinitely recreated by one molecule exchanging places with another — that is the endless waltz of time. No matter who you are, or what you do, or how you think, see, feel or change, I will always be with you. The world will always be with you. We, the world, my family, are at peace. Now, go forth: Bask in the all-of-us-everything-working-together, for we all, my family, are truly full of love. Nothing ever ends. Nothing ever ends.
Aaron Stella is former editor-in-chief of Philly Broadcaster. 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 excellence in opinion writing from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and best column writing from the Local Media Association, appears in PGN monthly. Aaron can be reached at [email protected].