ON BEING ASKED ABOUT HOPE 

I have no hope. None.

It is a crime. To not have hope. You become immediately marginalized.

I am told, there is always hope. There is no hope. Not in my world.

My world is the world of HIV/AIDS. A world of vast discrimination, inequality, hate, virulence, hunger, racism, deleterious sorrow, gnawing grief, despondency, and the sea of troubles that arrive with AIDS like a train wreck. Meanwhile, HIV is portrayed with lies, disingenuous illusion, something that is now a minor annoyance, everyone can get the medicine, times have changed, and you can cheerily go outside to run with the dog and play frisbee in the park. The sun shines just for you.

This is the world of the privileged white male. It’s a bubble surrounded by horror.

I live in Appalachia. The dead are everywhere. Opiate living is not living. Opiates and HIV go hand-in-hand like brothers in a maelstrom. People don’t want to hear the reality. We live in ghettoized dumps. We mourn. We beg. We chew on indifference at every turn. Many of us have no running water.

We still lose our jobs, we still have the fiery ordeal of side effects, we cannot afford to bury our dead, we cannot always find a clinic, and when we do, it’s often hundreds of miles away, there are cops with guns at the door, and we are told that the hard to reach (like us) are impossible to reach, and they wipe their hands of us. No one ever says that the hard to reach have nothing to reach for.

Nothing.

Appalachia has always been another country. We live in the hollows and the hills. We walk through the woods looking for herbal plants to sell and eat like indisposed animals.

We stand in line at whatever clinic there is, and we are told to come back next month as the pharmacy shelves are bare.

This can’t be America. This is America. Our America. And we seethe with rage.

We are disposable. We are less than human to America.

So. No. I don’t believe in hope. I believe in eating out of dumpsters. I believe in enormous pain. I believe in inconceivable indigence and sleeping rough in rain.

We chop wood for heat. Do you.

We do not exist. You see right through us. We are validated by nothing and no one. We lose ourselves in the dark clichés of religion. A circumnavigation of guilt and a borrowing from the bonehouse.

We will be buried in a potter’s graveyard. For me, it can’t happen soon enough.

I do not mean to be hateful, or defy the rules at the New York Times. But you asked me about hope, and all I see is a world where those of us who live here are forgotten by a world of loss.

So charge me with the crime and metaphor of bitterness and I spit on your hope. It’s not real to me and never will be. The privilege in the bubble does not mean us. Hope is just another bondsman nailing a notice to the door.

https://tim-barrus.format.com/about