Tim Barrus: New York Times
THEY NEVER SLEEP
I work with adolescent boys who live with HIV. AIDS is not over. Either are the cascade of drugs that come at them like an oblivion they fight in fear. They never sleep. Pacing back and forth at night in the creeping feed of a desolation while their hands wring and tremble with Tardive dyskinesias not unlike all the bleeding thorns of discontent.
Shaking as if it were their clothes.
I shove a mountain of blankets into the backseat of the car. There is no room to pace, grinding rabbit trails and scars in floors that are nothing but revolt. Trembling psychiatric fingers under blankets in a sweat without defeat.
At night, we will drive a hundred miles. This is both HIV and the antipsychotic drugs poured into them to shut them up. Until a quiet stillness closes all around us with the headlights of the car cutting through nothing less than death breathing down their pretty necks, that pulse so hard the entire planet is hideous. I wish the two of us could die.
Still in shells, they ask me where we are. We are sitting by the Appalachian river I always drive to. I know and I do not know where we are sitting in the shadows of such quiet hours imposed upon us both. Four eyes contracted, squeezed, calm world, gordian knots of frailty pretending to be mended. Thing is, place becomes ephemeral as the shadows dance in madness that never comprehends. These are not my children. These are my children.
We will never see the sun. It rises somewhere in surgical precision. My end and his.