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Edited on Thu Nov-30-06 01:39 PM by sui generis
I just want to say we're proud that we came through those times and still have the capacity to hope and give a damn about the rest of the world; that we have any capacity for humanity left that wasn't subsumed in bitterness and rejection and rage.
Yes, until you have talked the long, frank hours with your dying friends, and hoped in the face of all reality that some last second miracle would happen, and hoped even again as they breathed their last, until you've looked at their bloodless still faces, transformed from something vital and beautiful and full of humanity to a wasteland of cancers, blindness, and madness, it's impossible to understand.
We held their hands and put cool cloths on fevered foreheads when hospitals segregated them on "AIDS Wards", when nurses wore masks and full body armor in ignorance, when their loving "natural" families circled like vultures with writs and power of attorneys. We had to believe that we wouldn't get it from bedpans and bloody bandages and sweat, and most often from hopeless defeated tears.
The world doesn't really know about those moments, when we ourselves were children taking care of our own in face of betrayal, blame, abandonment, gibbering fear, and even worse, just ordinary apathy.
And for every "oh no not another AIDS story" lament, there are literally another million AIDS stories to lament, that people don't want to hear, can't bear to hear. We, so many of us, hold our pain where the rest of the world can't see it, should never have done to them what was done to us.
And had we known the cost to ourselves from the outset, the sheer impossibility of it, the unreality of it, the brute unending unyielding pain in the soul, that we would do it all over again without hesitation, for duty, for love.
I have stories. We all have stories. Those quilts, some funny, some sad, some grand and simple, tributes etched not in stone but in frail cloth by the fleeting heart of memory, those panels were a way to remember past the pain, to what was lost, to the people who fell then, and still fall.
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