can hardly recall what it felt like any longer, the time before the sickness. Now, in the seventh year of the calamity, my friends in L.A. The fact is, no one knows where to start with AIDS. Until that long night in October, it didn’t seem possible that any day could supplant the brute equinox of March 12-the day of Roger’s diagnosis in 1985, the day we began to live on the moon. That is the only real date anymore, casting its ice shadow over all the secular holidays lovers mark their calendars by. Roger Horwitz, my beloved friend, died of complications of AIDS on October 22, 1986, nineteen months and ten days after his diagnosis. The world around me is defined now by its endings and its closures-the date on the grave that follows the hyphen. Just half.Įqually difficult, of course, is knowing where to start. Now that he’s gone, the cup of my own health is neither half full nor half empty. What they don’t seem to understand is, I used up all my optimism keeping my friend alive. The very friends who tell me how vigorous I look, how well I seem, are the first to assure me of the imminent medical breakthrough. And it doesn’t care a whit about our categories-when is fullblown, what’s AIDS-related, what is just sick and tired? No one has solved the puzzle of its timing. All I know is this: The virus ticks in me. Doubtless there’s a streak of self-importance in such an assertion, but who’s counting? Maybe it’s just that I’ve watched too many sicken in a month and die by Christmas so that a fatal sort of realism comforts me more than magic. I don’t know if I will live to finish this.

Becoming a Man by Paul Monette