Dear Danny,
I asked Gary more than once how you got HIV. He didn’t know, but he told me other things. That you were having “a lot of crazy, crazy, crazy sex.” That you told him you once woke naked and alone on the grass in Central Park, empty whiskey bottles around you.
I don’t know why I needed to ask. Maybe I wanted a story with specifics. Maybe something to regret.
Seven months after you died, a few days before what should have been your fortieth birthday, I had a car accident in the first rain. The road was oily. I was driving too fast, just a little. There was a moment before the skid when I could have slowed down. Then the brakes locked, the car crossed the wet pavement into the opposite lane, and there was an oncoming car.
The surgeon who worked on my knee promised that it would heal completely. But when it rains, the pain is unbearable. Sometimes, I limp.
For years I have gone back to that earlier moment, not exactly blaming myself, but maybe wanting a different ending.
Maybe that was what I wanted to know. Did it matter to you how or when you got it? Was there a black-and-white moment when you could have hit the brakes?
If there was, then I could look out for such a moment in my own life.
Or perhaps there was no point to my question.
Maybe it was just life, a never-ending field of grays. Maybe that is what I could not bear.