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Put your hand through a wall

March 10, 2005

I’ve been thinking a lot about water under the bridge – not the whole thing with Dirck but the years and people gone by.

When I was sixteen, I was dating this guy named Joe – he was in his early twenties, wore a mohawk and was full of punk rock angst. I was smitten, and he was awful (I have a small scar on my face from him hitting me kind of awful). Though he wasn’t the one who introduced me to hard drugs, he was the one who introduced me to mainlining. We shared needles, in a romantic gesture of sharing blood and life force.

I also had another friend, Dan, who was deeply in love with me, who would have done anything for me. He did, in fact, do anything for me – in the spring right before I turned seventeen, I found out that Joe (by then an ex) had tested positive for HIV. I was terrified, and really had no one I could tell who wouldn’t reject or judge me outright. So I wrote a letter to Dan, who was living in a squat in Columbus, Ohio. He called me on a Saturday morning shortly after I’d sent the letter and said – “I’ll be at your house in 10 minutes – I got your letter yesterday and I’ve been driving all night. We’re getting you an HIV test.”

I got the results – negative – back on my seventeenth birthday, and Dan was there for that too.

He loved me with that burning, unselfish love that made him crazy. That same day I got my test results back, I invited my new crush out to dinner with us, with no regard for how Dan might feel about that. Dan went home and put his hand through a wall. Later I remember picking the scabs off his hand as he told me that he loved me too much to stay sane watching me fuck myself and him over so badly, but that he’d keep being there for me.

What Dan learned that spring, and what I’m learning now is - no matter how strong your love for someone is, it might not be enough. Figuring out how to care for and love yourself, when to say no to your love that is the tough part. How do you say no to your own love, tell it to cease and desist because it isn’t doing anyone any good?

Posted by Dacia at March 10, 2005 07:30 PM

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