2006-03-10 - 8:36 a.m.

What Exactly Were You Afraid Of?

How do you tell an ex -- well, not just an ex, but the love-of-your-life ex -- that you have HIV?

>> one word at a time

Um. Yeah. That's all there is to it...

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I think back to how thoughts of this tore me up a couple of months ago. And it wasn't easy last night either. But after dinner at Kafana, after the mixed green salad with gorgonzola, after the scallop-asparagus risotto, after the cup of coffee arrived, after the various small talk stuff, from mundane to serious, I managed to say it. And the sky didn't fall. And tears were not shed. And while he was kind of surprised that I've known for almost four years [damn, that freaks even me out -- four years???], there was not even a trace of telenovela to the remainder of our conversation.

Which is pretty much how I expected it to be.

So... it's out there. And it helped me explain why previous bits of the conversation were important. Why I still felt the need to talk about how much I still regretted many of the things that happened, even though we both have moved past them in so many ways (he more than I, I'm sure).

And it allowed me to tell him why it was important to me, going into the future, to be honest about these things, and to have it out there so that we don't forget that we never know what's going to happen, and to try to maintain a friendship while geography is still very cooperative.

And I felt ok at the end of it all, when we hugged in the car as he dropped me off, and I didn't want to cry.
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It just started raining again; I can hear it on the roof. The plum trees out in front are starting to bloom.