How to Make a Diamond

I maneuvered my way through the 7:03 a.m. train to Penn Station crowd to sit facing him just a few seats away, stealing glances to see if his face could make me feel what his bare calves promised on the platform: Muscular, hairy, and barely visible under black jean-cut shorts. He was broodingly sexy but also innocently unassuming, and very much in his own world, his giant headphones likely playing some fantasy goth band. But each time I tried to see what he looked like, I was met with dark brown eyes looking back into mine, with a resounding ‘yes.’

‘Is that a tragus piercing?’

I pulled the meaty cartilage on the inside of my ear while pointing at his. I’d gotten up a few minutes early to watch the last of Queens pass by, hoping he might join me. He confirmed that it was indeed that rare piercing, his face open and kind with thick lips under a broad, brown-sugar nose, his headphones now around his neck.

It was the Spring semester of 2003, so we didn’t pull out smartphones to exchange social handles, but we did secretly alter our schedules to ride the train together the rest of the week. Throughout these round-trip rides, we shared that he was gay and I was trending hard in that direction (but we already knew that). There was something so soft and yielding about his face that I associated with homosexuality despite the tattoos, piercings, and black clothes. And my interest was too unyielding not to have a sexual element.

It turned out we were both closeted and commuting from our parents homes but for different reasons: I’d had to bail on my ambitious New England university the previous semester to get hospitalized after a manic break and subsequent bipolar diagnosis and was now playing catch-up with myself, regaining my family’s trust and my own after being swept up in psychosis and substances while also trying to discover,

Was I only physically attracted to men, or could I fall in love with one?

He, on the other hand, had to ‘re-closet’ himself to return under his conservative first-generation parents’ roof, agreeing it was all a phase to be welcomed home after a relationship imploded, and he needed a place to crash and pay for school. Submitting to a Santerían ‘witch doctor’ who beheaded a live chicken in their rickety backyard shed and swung it by its feet to spray warm blood upon Dylan’s naked body while incanting prayers to turn him straight, which he agreed did the trick.

So, the Long Island Rail Road became our twice-daily date, sneaking make-out sessions on the evening return when the lights flickered under the tunnels, but it wasn’t enough, so I started bringing him home to my mom’s, where he was just my ‘buddy’ Dylan.

I hated lying, but she was happy I had a new friend who was also studying at a good college in the city, especially after my previously disastrous semester.

It was hard to fathom that in just six months, I went from being an asexual mental patient to now sucking face with a cool, cute peer I wanted to not just fuck but protect and get to know better. After picking him up from work to see his co-workers clamor to get a glimpse, I experienced emotional recoil, wondering if this is too much too fast, if he’s even the right one for me. What are the odds that the first guy I flirt with is going to be my great love?

‘Brett, I got some news today, and I just hope it doesn’t freak you out.’ Dylan said from my passenger seat in the restaurant parking lot, where he worked as a waiter on weekends.

I took his hands and tried to smile, ‘That would be hard,’

‘I went into the city to get test results at my clinic, and I didn’t expect to be positive. I just wanted to be safe because I have a history, and this is all new for you, but I was wrong,’ he gazed through the windshield, the fluorescent lot lights dramatically backlit his face.

‘What was wrong?’

‘I am positive.’

He turned to look at me with the resigned misery of a child who knows he’s about to be hit, the sad Travis album we loved singing in the background. I had gone to a similar clinic the year before after losing my virginity to a girl I didn’t respect in my dorm room, expecting these same results from that one interaction. Back then, you had to go to a specific clinic in a specific part of town and wait a harrowing 72 hours before returning for the results.

I said I wasn’t going anywhere, but I had no idea what would happen.

Physically, I held him, and silently I cried, but my mind careened wildly as an upswell of tender emotion for a man I was debating breaking off with an hour earlier engulfed me.

Dylan was only 23, but that was still 4 years older than me, and a lot can happen in that time. I saw him lying face down in a dark room, a line of men out the door waiting to fuck him, condoms conspicuously missing.

We clung to each other and listened to “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” as I calculated the likelihood of my co-infection. We hadn’t fucked yet, but I had sucked his dick…he didn’t cum, but there was no definitive literature on the internet, or pamphlets at any clinic to assure me I couldn’t possibly have seroconverted from pre-cum.

My first test came back negative, but it can take a while to show, so I returned to the Hispanic Aids Forum in Times Square every two weeks to get tested. I knew it was overkill, but it was how I managed my anxiety to be present for him after he took me there to meet his counselor.

I thought I had been going through it with my bipolar diagnosis, but this made my mental health struggles feel trivial, like years spent masturbating into my belly button, facing a hall of mirrors. If I had been hiding from sexuality and romance, my fears had been simultaneously justified and misdirected. Turning myself into both the object of fascination and revile when there is already so much out there waiting to love and tear me apart.

And now, tho the numbers were in my favor, what the percentages failed to take into account is that I deserved this. Why else would my first romance be so fucked? Just as I had deserved to hear those voices berate me, my peers reject, and family fear me, there are certain things the universe sends to justify our inherent shame and unworthiness. This is what I had been waiting for, bracing for, building up my pain threshold and endurance for.

I learned that when someone becomes HIV-positive, they can experience swollen glands and flu-like symptoms, so when my neck stiffened and I could no longer swallow, relaxing into the illness was impossible. With each day of fever, every scratchy swallow was a confirmation of the fate keeping me in this state.

My primary care physician dropped me when I told him about my relationship. I was only 19 and still saw my family doctor, who claimed I was putting myself in danger with a mixed-status relationship, and he didn’t feel right hiding this from my parents, whom he also treated.

A vague letter he sent home, ‘firing’ me, confounded my mom when she opened it.

Then, when my body refused to heal, I was sent to a lymphologist to rule out cancer before dropping out of school for a second consecutive semester to recover from what turned out to be a bad case of mono.

‘Is everything ok, Brett?’ Mom kept asking, running her hands through my hair as I curled up on the couch. And I knew she meant more than my health, though to what moral and mortal extent I wasn’t sure.

‘Aside from barely being able to lift my head off the pillow and missing another semester of school,’ I flashed her a crooked grin, ‘No complaints,’

But I was so far from ok. My days dripped by in a haze of anxious foreboding: Terrified for myself, concerned for Dylan, and only just beginning to accept my sexuality while hiding it all from the only other person in my now drastically minimized life, my mom. Something had to give. I knew that getting one of these secrets out could help me feel safer in my convalescent bed, that it wouldn’t feel as strange having my new ‘friend’ stop by every night to bring me Pedialyte and watch movies together if she knew we were in a committed relationship. I had to come out simply to have one less thing to worry about. What had previously seemed impossible was now simple compared to my love for Dylan and the fear for my own health.

It was like loosening the pressure valve in my swollen chest. Even with glands the size of ping pong balls under each jaw, I could immediately breathe better.

‘Oh Brett, it all makes so much sense now,’ she finally said something after releasing me from her clutches, the tears streaming down her face, a hand holding each of my shoulders. ‘I love you so much and just want you to be happy, but it’s already been such a tough year, and now I’m afraid you’ll have an even harder life being gay.’

She went on to say how she hated how Dylan’s parents disowned him, but also made it clear that we were welcome here anytime.

She was right that being gay had already proven difficult, and I hadn’t even told her about Dylan’s HIV status. And last year was practically impossible: I’d barely been able to concentrate through my first set of finals before fleeing the dorms early to go to the mental hospital in the hopes of breaking my frantically flaring mania.

And now, though I still wasn’t fully back on track, I had been thrown off again.

But I could also tell she was relieved that her only son, who had always been so alone, was capable of loving and being loved. I had always kept to myself. Focused on achievement instead of connection. After realizing I wasn’t like the other kids, I isolated- my solitude turning to neuroses and then psychosis, a tidal wave to drown out the original issues I had sought cover from. I always thought I needed to get my shit together before reconnecting, before proving worthy, but here I was being embraced for my true self, while still struggling to figure that out.

With a legitimate safe space and loving ally, I was now the patient, and Dylan was thriving: Going to his appointments alone, taking his meds & doing his schoolwork on the train so he could see me straight away. It was less than a year since I was in South Oaks Mental hospital, and as much as I had promised to just ‘put it behind me’, I now saw that there was so much I had never dealt with, and the longer I put it off, the more difficult it would become, and the sicker I would get if I didn’t. Loving Dylan was just my first step towards re-embracing life after rejecting myself and living in the shadows.

It turns out that love & life can be messy, but I want it all, and I don’t have to be perfect to try.