My Day Without Art

Today is the Day Without Art, the day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS epidemic. It’s also Manny’s birthday–or would have been his birthday. We were together for 8 years, until he died of AIDS complications in 1992, making me a widower at 28. I’ve mentioned him many times over the years, since but a wee LJ laddy, and despite all the friends and lovers that I’ve lost, his death remains the most significant, the most disruptive and powerful event in my life–the knowledge that we lumps of carbon are so briefly animated, and then so completely disintegrate into absolute nothingness. I didn’t know what nothingness was, what being alone really meant or felt like. When I go to his grave, I don’t talk to him, or imagine that he can hear me, or that he’s waiting for me in some white cloud-filled hotel suite–I think of his beautiful body turning to dust below me, and how disorienting it is that I can still hear him calling my name, laughing. I close my eyes and feel him blowing in my ear, touching my cheek. Nothing remains of him, just what’s locked in my head, for me. Todays’ the day that I celebrate his birth, his life, and grieve what has been taken away from all of us so prematurely and so cruelly.