Aids Virus

This hub describes the feelings of an Aids victim... the journey of his struggles.

MOMENT OF SHOCK:

It was the test that finally confirmed his worst fear. The two lines of the ‘+’ enlarged into bloody stains that popped right off the clinical white sheet. Like a cross all gone wrong…a life bleeding on it for no reason at all. A rotting waste.

HIV was something that happened to other people. It meant those nameless faces on t.v. in an African country you’d never visit. It was the momentary pang of sympathy for the emaciated eyes that showed next to advertisements for charity campaigns. Awareness for Aids, they said. How could one be really aware of it, till the poison ran through one’s own veins?

Submerged in life, Aids was a realm of darkness that one never entered till one fell over the edge...of life itself. But it was not the final black comfort of death that awaited one. It was the gray nonexistence that you fell into.

LIVING WITH AIDS: 

And life already began to mock him with it’s allure: things left undone… experiences waiting to be lived. It beckoned him with a charm such as never before. But instead of filling him with gratitude for the time he was left with, a deep sense of resentment began to take root within him. In a barren void where nothing good would ever grow again.

It started in those early days as he told friends and family his dark secret that he felt he needed to confess to the world. He formulated different ways in his mind to break the news: ‘this is going to come as a shock, but I’ve got a life threatening disease’… or, maybe, put a light spin on it, ‘can you believe it but I’ve got aids!’.. or better still, ‘I don’t have much time left to live’. Yes, that would be best…to draw in on sympathy and shift focus away from the word itself. Anything to somehow mask the truth, soften the blow.

REACTION FROM OTHERS:

But no matter how he tried, he wasn’t prepared for the instinctive cringing he got in response. What was it that drew this reaction? Pity for someone dying? Or did people smell the stench of death itself? Maybe, it was relief at having been spared themselves or just an innate need to protect oneself from a similar fate?

What was it, he wanted to know, that caused people to look at him with that mix of pity and horror, and that made his heart give up even before his body did? That look haunted him night and day…it made him scream in his sleep…except the sound seemed stuck in his throat forever.

THE BITTER REALITY:

There is no grace to dying. In those last days, there is only a tenacious clinging to life, an awkward, desperate groping. And so the resentment gave in to a dark, metallic anger….that wanted to hurt, draw blood in return. At times, he hoped, prayed for it to stop, but in those numbered days of his life, no light entered. God himself seemed to have receded into a numb spectator, as if having sealed his fate off, He’d grown bored and left. No prayer came to his lips. Just that voiceless screaming that never ceased.

He told himself, he deserved one chance at love…one moment before that pitiful cringing made one turn away. And so that night, as he lay in the arms of his girlfriend, he withheld his secret, and did not stop before he had passed that deadly legacy onto another. In that moment, he almost felt a godlike privilege… to wield death as the only gift left for him to give. His divine right now.