I asked my professor if I could leave class early that day.
I was sick, very sick, and the morning up until then had already given me troubles.
Then again, I am never a morning person, and each day’s initial obstacle of emerging from beneath my soft, pillowy comforter to attempt a few wobbly footsteps among the morning’s faded blue light is always a tremendous test of my will.
He waved me a gentle and concerned farewell. I had almost completely lost my voice and my feeble query croaked from the reddened cords within my throat.
“I could tell he was struggling,” my professor acknowledged to his teaching assistant as I walked out of the classroom. I don’t know if he knew that I had heard him.
I did not make it out of the building before I reached inside my backpack to grapple for my phone among the clutter. I instinctively dialed my mother, and possibly from the same instinctual nature, began to lose hot, uncontrolled tears from my weak and sleepy eyes.
She answered my call quickly, unusually quickly. Calling any of my family members during regular business hours was typically a futile effort. Capitalism puts us under the wringer. Sorry about your children, mothers and fathers. You need to mind your cubicle all day long.
But my mother knew. And a part of me regretted that. I never kept secrets from my mother, and I don’t think I ever could, but my recent confessions to her were of an entirely different nature.
I wondered if I would ever be old and independent and strong-willed enough to handle my life without help from my mother. She has so many of my burdens on her shoulders that she might as well give Jesus Christ a snack break and take the whole wide world out of his hands. She can carry anything.
A few days prior to that day, I had discovered that my first love was cheating on me.
Boys can’t break my heart, I’ve always said. That’s a waste of time, energy, and effort.
But boys can break your trust.
And they can break your health, too.
My family has a long, frightening list of health issues. Intense cancers at unusually young ages, diabetes and irritable gastrointestinal tendencies, blood pressure fluctuations and mental health disorders. I, in particular, had a bizarre and vastly uncommon bleeding disorder that imposed chronic and heavy nosebleeds, deviated sinus channels, and sometimes internal bleeding.
When I had asked my professor to leave, I had told him I wanted to get tested for the flu or mono. He warned me that a strain of strep was going around town.
I tried to isolate my symptoms.
You lost your voice because of strep.
You have a stomach ache because you literally drink your own blood.
Your head is throbbing because you’re scaring yourself too much.
But I isolated to rationalize, to rationalize my deepest and darkest fear of something far more sinister and lurking and fatal than bacterial strains and runny noses and diarrhea.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything wasn’t and couldn’t be so simply and easily isolated. Something inside me churned and wailed. As I sat in class, I writhed under the grip of an internal malfunction, an overall culmination of pains, instead of isolated sicknesses.
This isn’t right. I have never felt like this.
The birds and bees conversation is hugely different when you’re a young gay male. Parents can’t shake their heightened and deeply-rooted protective proclivity, and do not hesitate to be blunt when they scare you about sex.
Sex is dangerous. But so are people, untrustworthy, self-fulfilling, sex-addicted people.
My parents must love me so much that they found it crucial to warn me about holding hands in public or walking home alone at night. Gays get raped and murdered. Always be vigilant.
I dared to do something I had never done before, coming to terms with my desperation as I worked in my morning class in intense bouts of pain. I had always been vigilant about people, but not always vigilant about my health.
I reach for a single laptop key with one, slow cautious finger.
You said you would never do this.
I began to type.
S – y – m –
I picked up the pace, conquering a horrible fear.
Symptoms of HIV.
I think God pulled my eyeballs out of my sockets and Gorilla-glued them to my laptop screen. I read with total mesmerization.
I have it.
I know I have it.
Crying without a voice is a strange sensation, a strange sound, a strange feeling, a strange outreach for a more dramatic reaction that you cannot grasp.
I wanted to scream and cry and shout and sing and dance and yell and wail and burst, but I couldn’t. Instead, my insides burned as I tried to release my frustrations and festering anxieties while my body simultaneously battled this outcry, cruelly withholding my satisfaction.
And of course, when a child cries, a mother cries, too.
For a split second, I had an omnipresent moment, overlooking my own crying physical body as I sat in the driver seat of my car, too afraid to leave the school campus to learn my truth. I found it bizarre, the image of me crying alone in my Jetta while my mother cried alone in her office as we both silently gasped and heaved on opposites ends of a phone call.
“I don’t want you to be disappointed in me,” the words exploded out of my mouth as if they weren’t real. It was the ugliest sentence I had ever said. My voice sounded ridiculous, so much so that I thought it couldn’t have been me who had said it.
I realized then and there what was making both of us cry so violently.
If I had been afflicted under the merciless hands of the world’s worst living autoimmune disease, then I would die. But then that would be it. I would die, finally relieved of the pain and the torment and the lifelong battle.
But my mother would live.
The most horrifying thing on our conceivable earth is not to die, but rather, the opposite.
I wasn’t crying for my own worst nightmare.
I was crying for hers.
I would be gone from our physical world and my mother would have to continue without me, a miserable existence of grief and sorrow.
Days later, I returned to classes. My peers and I had to play a silly game in one of my communication courses where we pulled labels out of a hat and taped them to each other’s foreheads.
The activity was supposed to teach us about stereotyping and the unconscious, impetuous ways in which we judge others.
I pretended to have fun as I approached my classmates and treated them like they were “poor” or “frail” or “incompetent.”
Minutes passed, the game concluded, and I pulled the taped strand of copy paper off of my forehead.
Unclean.
I thought about screaming at my professor, teaching her a lesson she would never forget about sensitivity and ignorance.
But I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry at life and its great, cyclic irony.
I wondered what it would be like to be a permanent social pariah, metaphorically displaying unclean written across my forehead with no possible means to rip the tape off.
I gently folded the paper in halves until it was too small to do so again. I tucked it in my back pocket, making sure that I didn’t return the adjective into the hat again.
I tested positive for strep, and for nothing else.