AIDS is not a world hidden in a few boxes. It is here.
AIDS will take the lives of everyone who crosses its path. It is a hat of disease no matter who you are or where you come from. So far, people seemed oblivious to the horror. It was as if people felt they had some kind of impenetrable force field.
AIDS has penetrated my force field not once but many times. If people don’t become more educated and safer with the intimate encounters they choose, AIDS might knock on their doors. There is no cure nor is there any question that if people continue to act AIDS invincibility will win! When I first heard about AIDS, I looked at the disease as if it was something that would never touch my life. I consider it a disease that exists in several third world countries. I regard AIDS as a terrible tragedy but not mine. The first beat I received inside my invincibility bubble came when I was about ten years old. I live with my father and my brother. Neither my sister nor I have seen or heard from our mother in four years. Suddenly, suddenly, we started talking to him. Shortly after we started talking to him, he told us he had cancer. Here it was my mother suddenly came back in my life and she was dying. Several months later, he came to visit us. It was beautiful to be in his arms and see his smile.
That’s not all good though. It was on this visit that my sister called panicked begging my father not to sleep with my mother. Finally, he gave an explanation. My mom doesn’t have cancer. She has HIV I know nothing about the disease other than once infected it is a death sentence. So I started researching everything I could about this disease. My mom disappeared before we could ask her about it and then on the phone she wouldn’t talk about it much. Through my sister, we were kept informed about my mother’s condition.
I don’t see my mother’s daily life but I know what kind of person she is. While I won’t swear my life on the information I receive, I believe 99 percent of it to be authentic. My mother is a wild woman and she lives by her own rules. He had a rough life growing up. Even though she tried countless times to pull herself out, she couldn’t. I don’t hold onto anger for whatever choices he made because they were the choices he made. I hope he has been stronger and has made wiser choices. After she finds out she’s sick, she decides to rule life regardless of the consequences. My mother is a drug user and has several sexual partners who are male and female. This behavior doesn’t stop once he finds out he’s infected. In fact, it is all the more intensive.
My mother is one of those people who deliberately infected large numbers of people. He also chose not to take medication for HIV and AIDS. The only time he’s going to take it is when he’s hospitalized, which doesn’t happen more than a few times. I saw my mother about five months before she died in 1996. She looks great. He’s a little thinner than usual and he doesn’t have teeth. She is very happy. He looked like a child on Christmas morning. This is the first time I’ve seen him in six years. Five months later, he was in the hospital. Her body was swollen everywhere. All I know is that he died from drinking unclean water.
It was water coming from the tap in her run-down apartment. My mother died from drinking water! How extraordinary is it to die from drinking water? About a year after my mother visited, my father began to rash his knees. She went to the hospital but they couldn’t find out what had caused the rash. They thought maybe it was dust, so we actually cleaned our house from top to bottom.
The rash doesn’t go away.
One night, a few weeks after the rash started, I woke up in the middle of the night. My father called my name but it was very different from what had been heard before. There was a panicked plea in her voice that terrified me so much. I jumped out of bed and ran to my father who was tripping over the stairs from his bedroom.
He said he couldn’t see. He’s blind! As a person I know as unbreakable standing in front of me, terrified, I want to be crushed but I can’t. I dialed the tel number Call my uncle and tell them what happened. When we waited for them to arrive, I dressed my father. It seemed like time stood still as we waited for my uncle’s wife to arrive to take my father to the hospital. The next day, my father’s vision had returned and he told me he would have the doctor test him for HIV.