Not really

...because it's my birthday

I wake up drenched in sweat at 6:45 again, it’s always 6:45 again and I like to pretend I don’t know why, like my life is this mystery to me and I don’t have to change my sheets constantly and the second-to-last thing you used that number to tell me didn’t fling me clean off the edge of math. The bright side is I can now understand why Sarah laughed and laughed in God’s face. What else could she do, I mean what can you do when your blood is not your blood, your god is not your god, not in any way you could’ve conceived (ha ha) of at least, or when the singular person you care most for in this world tells you YOU ONLY CARE ABOUT YOURSELF. Just like that: ∞ = 0, and you can either accept this axiom or slink back into that filthy Plato’s cave of yours stupid, laughing.

In your defense I get why people hate us, I do. Stevie Nicks was right (a redundancy if there ever was one) to call the poets PRIESTS OF NOTHING. As a child I’d interrogate adults—who might as well have all been undercover clergy—on why they used so many words to say or in more cases avoid saying what to me were so obviously the only three concepts worth relaying to another person, which were I’M COLD and I’M HUNGRY and I LOVE YOU, and what’s the point of dressing everything in such elaborate vestments instead of saying what remains so desperate to be said, still, after all the centuries. But then I became a writer. I’m so medicated I hardly feel the cold anymore, or hunger.

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The infectious disease doctor doesn’t have much of a reaction when I tell him about the night sweats, evidently because he’s more interested in how much sex I’m not having.

“Really? You know oral counts,” he offers, as if to console me.

“I know. I’m basically a nun. I live with my parents, and just work all the time, so . . .”

“Ah, and what do you do again?”

“I, uh, tutor. Writing.”

Can he tell I write scarcely more than I fuck?

“Well, it was great to see you.” He scribbles on his pad. “The nurse will be with you shortly.”

I check out his ass while he leaves. Flat, sure, but kind of tight-looking too, sort of like David Duchovny’s in the nineties.

They draw blood. Ten vials. Is that a lot?

“It’s the most I’ve ever taken from someone,” the nurse admits.

I contemplate saying she probably shouldn’t tell patients things like this, but I compliment her acrylics instead. All the while I’m running my fingers along the wire bridge of my N95, palpating for a breach I know isn’t there.

Image description: a still from Does Your House Have Lions (2021), a documentary by Vishal Jugdeo and vqueeram. Dhiren, a queer Dalit person with brown skin, short, wavy hair, and a beard, is pictured in profile, with a pensive downward gaze, the soft light from an unseen window illuminating the back of his neck. His face fills the frame, and is mostly in shadow. Speaking to someone just beyond the right-hand frame, he says, “And because I’m in a different register of loneliness [comma]”

I’m cursing myself for not bringing anything sugary on the car ride home—it’s Inauguration Day and I’m too faint to follow its simple and sole instruction, TAKE OMENS FROM THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS, a daily practice for me usually but which now feels impossibly stilted, like breathing while aware of it—when my memory fishes out a miraculously intact quote from Rilke: “The blood is what counts – that is what you have to be able to read,” and from beneath that one leaps another, this one from Dracula, which I argued to considerable self-satisfaction in an undergraduate paper was a five-word distillation of the novel’s ambitions: “What does that blood mean?” Well now I’m laughing: I can’t read my blood, no one can, that’s what undetectable means, that my blood does not self-mean, it always passes or fails itself off as else. Why shouldn’t this auto-illiteracy be all-coagulating? I mean how can I bleed so easily, be so prolific in my output or outpouring when I lack such a vital fluency in myself . . .

(All this is a pedantic way of putting my real problem, that I write more than I read. Always have. Read me a drop and I’ll write you a vial. O Hell, make it ten!)

Blood is a word; it means nothing on its own. Open a dictionary and you’ll find each pointing to a dozen others, screaming, Not me! Not me! My blood is not me; meaning an ever-borrowed flame. There is a desire to shake and smear everything, cleave oceans together, equalize their salinities. David Wojnarowicz found relief in diagnosis, said he’d spent all this time trying to destroy himself and now he didn’t have to. I recognize a cellular want for all lovers to hurt all lovers, to close the pores at whim. Showering deadens their cries with equal and opposite force.

To ask what that blood means is also to ask: Why today? Today segments like an orange. I splay out the slices and scry. One today is January 6, 2025, another the thirteenth of March, 2026. I was 27 today. I am 25.

Image description: Dhiren (left) and vqueer (right) sitting on an unpictured bed, conversing. vqueer is a trans person with brown skin, long wavy black hair and glasses. Over the course of three film stills, stacked from top to bottom, they say: “You’re not trying to rid the world of loneliness or ugliness, you’re trying to make loneliness or ugliness more livable.”

I’m not sure which today this is, my first one stepping foot outside the apt. since November 5. I did vote and this scared me. They call them voluntary, the elections, much like the biannual check-ups my New York State Department rep contacts me to “highly recommend” I book as soon as possible. (Are you going to make the appointment now, or am I going to have to keep badgering you?”)

So what does all this blood mean? That I spent the last sixty days without feeling the sun or night air in my face, two months reliving a sad B-roll of my adolescence, which feels like the whole of it now, or the hole through which the rest fell through—jerking off to the same pictures of David Duchovny’s nonexistent ass, straining to hear the same footsteps beyond the same door which doesn’t lock—and what does it mean that this period of isolation would’ve extended indefinitely on either side if it weren’t flanked by my “elective” participation in two checkpoints of civic theater, would’ve gone unnoticed had I not been told by the State that I was in so many words due to prove my adherence to a medicinal regimen that mitigates my chances of posing a public health risk, this public which risks me, which all but bounds me to my bed, which gawks at me while it coughs open-mouthed at polling sites and in waiting rooms? When, precisely, did I start holding this chalice, administering the sacraments, wearing the alb?

Another today has me watching All Of Us Strangers, struck dumb by a dialogue between Andrew Scott’s character and his dead mother (who, being dead, is quite literally “stuck in the eighties”):

MUM: They say it’s a very lonely kind of life.

ADAM: They don’t say that anymore.

MUM: So you’re not lonely?

ADAM: If I am it’s not because I’m gay. Not really.

MUM: Not really?

There’s something miraculously painful about that refrain, “not really.” Like a wound that makes you want to touch it again and again just to verify the pain is there. Only the pain isn’t there (not really), that’s the miracle of the thing, the thing you touch and the thing that hurts is only the referent for what really hurts, which is not the wound but the promise of one. And you keep touching the promise. Sorry, I keep touching the promise. Don’t you just hate the phrase “rub one out?”

Today is a long while ago. I receive an email. The subject line: ARE YOU A MEMBER OF THE LGBT COMMUNITY? ARE YOU LONELY? And if I answered yes to both, won’t I please take a moment to fill out our community wellbeing survey— . . . How strange is this forcible conflation or slippage between holding an identity and necessarily belonging to some nebulous cloud of people who also share in it. Etymologically speaking, identity points to the quality of, or capacity for, being identical to someone else. Where does that leave those whose identities serve only to differentiate and estrange them, who have no community, or whose communities won’t have us? What of the leftists who eagerly embrace “community” to signal a liberatory politic yet have not, and would never, change an adult’s diaper? Will I ever stop boring holes in you with such questions?

Image description: a low-resolution meme featuring a silhouette of a face with the words “I’m gay and sad” written inside the head to represent the person’s inner thoughts. An arrow points from the thoughts to the mouth, from which a speech bubble says, “My work explores queer intimacy in an increasingly isolated world.” I will update this caption with attribution if I find the source.

“The other thing that we’re fighting for,” Joselia Rebekah Hughes put it to me on one of our long phone calls, “we’re saying no to the violence against detail, the violence of abbreviation.” I like that. Abbreviation is a triage logic, albeit an often necessary one for making ourselves legible and available for connection and coalition building. For the sake of this essay, this movement, this survey, I am (like) you. But when the riots disperse and the bars close, when the drugs wear off and the venues shutter or last long enough to be co-opted, when you did or didn’t secure the job, the visa, the grant, the permit, the prescription, the invite, the legal protections—how, then, do you take the train home and inhabit yourself at the terrifyingly real, 1:1 timescale of an individual life? How do we unabbreviate our lives, our dead, our de(a)bt(h)s?

These are questions of chronicity, of how we endure ourselves.

Like those of poetry and sex, the language of politics makes us slant rhyme with ourselves. To live—to be subjected to living—politically is to live in a constant state of not-quiteness. That feeling of parallaxis between truth and reality can enthrall in small doses: the admixture of disgust and intrigue when the catechist tells you that, no, the host you eat on Sundays, which you know to be bread, is really the body of Christ; the way the air lilts or laughs a little when a dark room you could’ve sworn you weren’t alone in reveals itself as empty; the first time a man calls you a name in bed, under his breath. What was that, you ask. Nothing, he shushes you, though you both know you heard him the first time. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

My morbid fascination with the negative capability of metaphor—how could words mean and not mean themselves—drew me, mothlike, to the half-light of poetry. The treachery Magritte painted about, I wanted to get to the other side of it, to proselytize the minimifidian with a cockeyed no, really. What no one warns the young (perhaps because they wouldn’t listen, though that’s no excuse) is that neither side of the curtain—writer/reader, preacher/supplicant, dom/sub—innoculates against the sort of doubled degredation, hazy and hazing, that an image (a person can be image) doubles over in copy after shitty copy of itself just to endure.

I am trying to wonder—making an oxymoron of myself, I know—if endurance begins precisely when we insist on the “not really,” on contending with our loneliness lonelily, on its own lonely terms. A deep loneliness that both is and exceeds (undoes?) the political, a loneliness for which community is neither cause nor cure. “Nothing outside can cure you,” Bernadette Mayer (who I maintain should’ve added a line break here) reminds us, “but everything’s outside.” We endure then by insisting against the possibility, the desire, for cure; by “stay[ing] with the unconscious, and not with raising consciousness,” as psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles envisioned for the proletariat; by endeavoring not “to rid the world of loneliness,” but “to make loneliness or ugliness more livable,” to borrow from vqueeram, who holds solidarity’s casualties with more gentleness and criticality than anyone I know.

There is an elemental dignity, surely, to granting a person their own lonely. Toni Morrison gets at this in Sula (“Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you . . .”); Jasbir Puar too, in the opening coda to Right to Maim (“There are many things lost in the naming of a death as a ‘gay youth suicide’”). I understand this dignity intellectually yet deny it myself, framing as I do your reading of this very newsletter as “supporting the work of a living HIV+ writer.” I cling to the hull of politics like a barnacle, ask for care on an identitarian basis because it’s less exposing than acknowledging the palimpsest on which is inscribed, variously: please read me, write me, I’m lonely, come to Hartsdale, it’s so cold here, the writing, oh so cold I can’t catch something deeper than breath. But hey, if the alb fits.

Image description: a very wide black-and-white photograph by Ann Hamilton. An elderly woman is pictured from the shoulders up, looking at the camera with pursed, slightly upcurved lips. The lens is positioned in the photographer’s open mouth, such that the woman is framed by an eye-shaped border. The photo has a shaky blurred quality due to the movement of the lens and the slow shutter speed, which makes the foliage behind the woman barely discernible.

I learn about the photographer Ann Hamilton and wonder if you still are one, if I still am one. She takes long exposures using her open mouth as an aperture. I fuck a man in Tarifa. He’s in his upper forties maybe, it’s hard to see in the dark, and his house is built around a slab of the town’s original wall. I won’t remember touching him, but will remember running my fingers along that wall at his urging: cool to the touch, bruised with something—not History, not really. As I’m writing all this I’m taking in a breathlessly long image, a lifelong exposure of all the cocks I’ve hardened and walls I’ve touched and fogs I’ve groped and histories forgotten. Some men have such beautiful asses I could write about them for just years. And all this writing is reading, I’m searching for something I already said, that you’ve already read.

I could say I’m writing you because of a number: yours; mine; 27 years now I’m born; six since lockdown; the 248 T-4 cells found in a cubic milliliter of my blood at the time of diagnosis (ninth in the binary sequence, which made it feel like I had a computer virus more than a biological one); sixty days±nights housebound; a partridge in a pear tree. But surely I can’t be serious, or at least self-serious. Can’t I say what I really mean for once, show up to the living, to the page, truly empty-handed and unoccasioned—no metaphoric flourish, no sidewinding apology, no April rain, no flowers bloom—just to say I love you and I want genocide to stop?

Am I writing this because I’m lonely? Am I lonely because I’m “COVID-cautious?” And am I COVID-cautious because I’m HIV-positive, positive because I’m gay. Not really. What I can say is none of you can cure me, but all of us are here. Let politics choke on the lonely when it swallows us.

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