there was no good reason for me to think i'd be
feeling this way tonight. we watched
a movie with naked men and vespas and talked about subtle human psychoses, smoked cigarettes on the porch, went to
the rib eye and a big lump of white loogeyness came out of my creamer and some aging hipster offered to buy everyone steak. and on the way home, we were talking so innocently about
casual sex and colleen says,
'you get tested, right?'
well, no.
not right. as a matter of fact, so fucking far from right i could feel the world swallowing me up as we drove through the darkness. nothing that even approaches right, not even the same species, too opposite to be described with a mere antonym.
she tried to make it better, by telling me why i should. of course, i knew all that.
past tense. knew it and somehow forgot about it. i think about
crabs, about
herpes, things you see a physical manifestation of. i trust that my partners, if nothing else, would be good enough humans not to
knowingly expose strangers to diseases. but what if they
didn't know? what if they had a disease, and it wasn't something whose symptoms show up until long after it's too late? what if one of them had
the big one?
how could i be so blind? i have been tested, but not recently enough to have it mean anything. i talk and i tout the virtue of
personal responsiblity. and then i turn around and treat sex like it was nothing, that all it need be is consensual and 'safe' and i've done my part. but they taught us a long time ago,
there is no safe, never ever, not for sure.
i realize the
probability is tiny, so small that if i were to round it would be labled
impossibility. but that's the funny thing about probability - no matter what the chances are,
it still either is or it isn't and no grey area exists. i have never known a condom to break. i have had mishaps, two, but with people i more or less trusted. but there's another easy trap,
consoling myself with faith in my own judgement of character. and i don't know who he slept with who slept with her fiancee who slept with his college girlfriend who slept with her high school boyfriend who got
so drunk one night before he met her and found himself naked the next morning next to
the girl who died of aids just last year.
i'm amazed, that they spent so much time beating that
logic into us all, and i allowed myself to completely ignore its existance. but reality has colonized my
garden of eden like some quick-breeding, high pollinating
tree of knowledge and damn. i know now, don't i. i remember it all, in a thunderclap. and, my god
(
i am so sorry)