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Anya
August 22, 1995
Anya's Apartment, Sunset District, San Francisco
The counselor called me into a room; I had an anonymous card with my number on it. She asked me a few questions. I told her about the relationship with Michael, and that it had been awhile since I got tested. But the last result I got was negative. I told her that my boyfriend was coming soon. She opened up her list of numbers, matched my number, and said, "Well, you're positive."
I can't, the feeling was absolutely... it was like something got knocked out of me, and I felt absolutely numb. Everything got kind of grainy. It didn't make sense to me. I was not prepared. I was practically hyperventilating; I wasn't able to cry. I couldn't talk. She was trying to tell me all these things. And I was just thinking, "I'm not going to be able to have kids. Fuck." I was in a panic. "Shit, they depend on me, and I'm not going to be able to go to work in a few hours. God, how am I going to tell my family?" I asked the counselor to give me a hug because I was so freaked out. So... So David came in twenty minutes later, someone had been watching for him... and I had to tell him. Of course he was caught up in the panic of his own health risk, but he took me up off my chair and onto his lap and held me even though he was freaked out. Unfortunately, I spent the first few weeks freaking out more about the possibility of losing David, than thinking about what it meant for me to have HIV.
I should say one other thing. When I told David about the relationship I
had been in with Michael, he responded with, "Why? It seems like an insult
to your intelligence to have been with someone like that. Why did you do it?"
He did not understand why I might have loved Michael, whether or not
he was positive, and wanted to be close to him. At the moment I found out
I was positive, I felt like it validated what he'd been saying to me all
along,
that if I had been smart I never would have been involved with Michael. At
the time those sentiments became central to my own thinking.
MW: Was another component that since he couldn't understand why you were with someone who was positive, he wouldn't want to be with you?
Anya: I hope his experience with me helped give him a sense of why I was with Michael. It took David a few months to pull away from me. But eventually he did. He found reasons why it wasn't working for him; he nitpicked to find an escape route. He would get freaked out about anything relating to bad health. Sometimes he wouldn't want to kiss me. He was in a lot of conflict about wanting to make love to me. He'd want to, but then he would suddenly get scared. Sometimes he said, "I can't do this." But sometimes he would initiate it.
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