On Sunday, a friend of mine told me that he had recently been diagnosed as HIV positive. I have never known anybody until now that was HIV+, or at least anyone who had told me. Consequently, I cried. I cried a lot more than I was expecting to cry. For years now I knew that eventually, me or someone I knew would become HIV+, and I would have to cope with it. The problem is, even though nobody deserves it and you never expect it, the person who told me he had gotten it was absolutely the last person I'd expect. He absolutely does not deserve it.

I kept thinking, "Oh my God." I kept saying, "Oh God". And I kept having to remind myself, "Kai, you don't believe in God." I had this dilemma because I don't believe in god, because what fucked up god would allow this to happen on his watch? I also had absolutely nobody to talk to that might lend me any kind of solution to my emotions. So I turned to God. It really confused me because it had been years- certainly longer than I've been an athiest- since I had experienced something that confounded my capacity to deal on a purely rational level.

Part of the reason I stopped believing in god was that all of my life experiences up to that point kept telling me that the whole thing was just a sham. That I was foolish for believing in God, and now all of a sudden I had a hard time dealing with something and I needed one all the same.

In the conversation leading up to his telling me he had HIV, I had this absolutely horrible feeling in my stomach. Mostly like I was going to throw up. Every step the conversation took closer to that conclusion the louder I kept hearing in my head, "no, no, no, no". I'm not going to lie and say that the two of us have always been very close friends. I've known him for a year and a half and we are somewhere in-between acquaintance and friend. In the last few days we've done a lot of talking and I know in the future we will definitely be much closer. The complication is that he is somebody who I have long been very interested in.

I discovered something about myself that I find bewildering. Finding out that he is HIV+ did not make him less attractive to me. Not that this is about me, but of course in the process of comprehending everything that night -I promise you I didn't sleep very much(I couldn't)- this was one of the subjects I thought about. I know there are lots of positive/negative couples and that with the proper precautions the negative partner will never contract HIV. I know that I don't judge him for one mistake, that I don't buy the stigma attached to it. What I didn't know, what I absolutely did not expect from myself, is that I might still be capable of being attracted to someone who is going to have to deal with a very serious illness for the rest of his life.

Upon this discovery, of course, I got scared and confused and suddenly not very sure that I was capable at all, but there you go.

As I talked to him more and more, he told me things that changed how I looked at the situation. When I told him that he was the first HIV+ person I've known, he told me that he personally has come to know that friends of mine are HIV+. None of those friends have said anything to me, and I wondered why not. It sort of made me feel bad, like I wasn't somebody that my friends felt they could come to. He told me about all the medications he needs to take, and the effects and the side effects. Then he asked me (rhetorically) why all this medicine just seemed to be making him more sick. He needs sleeping pills because he can't sleep, and deoderant because all the fevers make him sweat like crazy, and all these other little complications to a life that very certainly didn't need any extra to begin with.

I can't imagine what it would feel like knowing that a mistake you made meant the rest of your life would change forever. He tells me what it feels like, but in my head all I can sense is pain in the most general sense. Just that something has gone horribly wrong and it's absolutely not supposed to be this way.

I don't believe in God, but this disease is so wrong that I can't help but think there's something evil and malicious, lurking.

I gave him a copy of Flight Volume 2 to cheer him up, and I suggest it for anyone who needs cheering. I also gave him a very long hug, and the poor guy had such a high fever that I could feel it on my face the entire drive home.

HIV/AIDS was always in my mind as one of those bad things, but to actually know someone affected makes it so different... so much worse.