![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Recently I've been noticing statements which go something like:
"I met someone I like but I won't get involved with him because he's HIV+ and I'm not."
There's all sorts of implications to this, all sorts of hidden meanings and classifications, only one of which I want to address right now.
When I met my former lover, Eddie, he had already been diagnosed with KS. Very minor, and he was fine otherwise, but it was still there. Not just the sometime-in-the-future hovering possibility of illness, but the full-blown CDC death sentence.
I was scared, certainly, but I also knew that I had never met anyone like him. So out of ignorance, or blindness, or an overdeveloped sense of romanticism I *didn't* run - I jumped. We moved in together, we bought a co-op, we travelled. We had parties, went to the opera, spent Christmas with my family in California. We had four years, four years which I will always consider a precious gift.
I cannot imagine the person I would be today had I not met him. I cannot imagine living life and never experiencing the glorious feeling of being totally, completely and profoundly in love. Never knowing the wonder of each morning waking up with someone whose very presence makes you smile, laugh, glow.
Knowing that, I cannot imagine rejecting it because it might be difficult or require strength beyond the imagined norm. There are never any guarantees; there are only choices, and all choices carry some risk.
If you only see people as risks and possible dangers, you will never see the parts of people that love and can be loved. There's a safety in being in love that for me transcends any safety from caution or avoidance that I can imagine.
"I met someone I like but I won't get involved with him because he's HIV+ and I'm not."
There's all sorts of implications to this, all sorts of hidden meanings and classifications, only one of which I want to address right now.
When I met my former lover, Eddie, he had already been diagnosed with KS. Very minor, and he was fine otherwise, but it was still there. Not just the sometime-in-the-future hovering possibility of illness, but the full-blown CDC death sentence.
I was scared, certainly, but I also knew that I had never met anyone like him. So out of ignorance, or blindness, or an overdeveloped sense of romanticism I *didn't* run - I jumped. We moved in together, we bought a co-op, we travelled. We had parties, went to the opera, spent Christmas with my family in California. We had four years, four years which I will always consider a precious gift.
I cannot imagine the person I would be today had I not met him. I cannot imagine living life and never experiencing the glorious feeling of being totally, completely and profoundly in love. Never knowing the wonder of each morning waking up with someone whose very presence makes you smile, laugh, glow.
Knowing that, I cannot imagine rejecting it because it might be difficult or require strength beyond the imagined norm. There are never any guarantees; there are only choices, and all choices carry some risk.
If you only see people as risks and possible dangers, you will never see the parts of people that love and can be loved. There's a safety in being in love that for me transcends any safety from caution or avoidance that I can imagine.
