This piece appears on Joe Levitt’s website: Hit Record

Suicide. Since the age of six, every night night after I go to bed, I become viscerally aware of how deeply wrong it is to be here. To endure the pain of my body, and the extent to which there is nothing that can touch this pain except perhaps for death. But as an adult, this conflict between life and death takes on even a more compelling, adversarial grip around my throat. My own hand strangling myself.

I am a horrible person and I want it all the end.

Sleep is a few hours of respite.

I dream of killing myself, but I know that as an adult it becomes harder and harder. I have children.

I wish I didn’t.

It was another mistake. I am a stupid, stupid man.

I have AIDS.

No one knows this. No one.

Even today, if I walk down the street anywhere in San Francisco, The opportunity to have sex with other men pops up a minimum of twice for every block I walk.

I used to take advantage of it – sex was a way to lose myself – and I was having sex seven to eight times a day. Every day.

My life was a nightmare then, and it’s a nightmare now.

I am being eaten alive by bone death. I have broken every bone in my body. This is called avascular necrosis, and it is the result of having so much prednisone pumped into my body to open up my lungs because pneumocystis pneumonia has brought me to the point of drowning . Prednisone will open your lungs so you can breathe. This is an immediate fix. Then, prednisone attacks your bones.

I have had surgery after surgery. All of them have failed.

I grit my teeth and plow through my day.

I shot myself with a shotgun. That failed, too. Scars cover my body to the extent that if I am dressed you would never know.

But I know.

Even sitting in a chair is an extraordinary struggle.

Today, I work with kids who are at risk for HIV, and a few have it. We talk a lot about what it means to be alive. Most of these kids are runaways, thieves, junkies, criminals, shoplifters, school failures, and all of them are poor.

We also talk a lot about how sex work cannot be the only way to stay alive.

Sex work is not a moral issue. Choosing to stay alive is.

All of it swirling in an endemic poverty breathless to behold.

This job is a mistake, too. All of us should be dead. I do not know why we struggle so hard to be here. I do not get it.

I wish I didn’t have this job so I could sink into a deep depression and then get it over with.

Outside of the relationships I have with these kids, I covet no relationships with adults, and have none.

Our little group is glued together. Sometimes they die, and we just stand there at the side of some hospital bed, and we stare a lot at our feet.

I keep telling myself that I can’t bear to lose another one of them, and then I bear it.

AIDS is not over.

The politically correct feel AIDS is, indeed, over. Antiretrovirals will keep you alive, but they will not keep you out of grocery store dumpsters so you can feed yourself. My biggest problem with the dumpsters is the toxic glue they put around the top so it makes it difficult to get it, and if you do touch the glue, it will take you two weeks to get it off. The toxic glues makes me very sick.

Hunger or toxicity. Choose.

Last week there was a hurricane where I live in North Carolina.

Grocery stores took a hit. The dumpsters were flooded. Anything that was in there was rotten. I ate it anyway.

I am still here. It is a curse.

I sleep maybe a couple of hours a night. Some nights, not at all.

Fentanyl will give you dreams far more insidious than LSD is said to be. But the dreams from Sustiva, a powerful antiretroviral, will eat you alive.

The politically correct rhetoric on Fentanyl will not tell you the whole story. The politically correct rhetoric about how all you have to do is take one little pill a day, has us out there in fields of green, smiling in the sun, and playing frisbee with our dogs. Glowing in heath.

It’s bullshit.

It’s a publicists lie.

I go to bed, and life comes roaring at me like a train on its iron way to hell.

All my mistakes on a silver platter. Some nights, I would kill for sleep.

I have failed at writing. I have failed at video. I have failed at putting a decent roof over my head. I have failed at every dream I have ever had. I have failed at keeping the kids I work with alive.

Lots of people have hopes they can cling to. I perceive hope as just another bpnr thrown to the dogs of war. Unleashed to tear your guts apart.

I don’t want to be here whether you can understand it or not. What you understand is not germane to anything.

The kids and I prop one another up. Bit it’s fundamentally ephemeral. We’re going to die and we know it. It’s scary. I am afraid.

That does not mean I am not tired from the struggle to be here. It is not worth what it takes to make it from one day into the next.

Yet every day, EVERY DAY, just like everyone else – all you normals – we get up in the morning, insomnia or no insomnia, and we put our panty hose on one leg at a time.

To the reader: you’re really not all that relevant to me. I DO write for myself. Writing for an audience – this would be the normals, whom I loathe – leaves a bitter taste in my motherfucking mouth. Don’t respond. Don’t email me.

It’s for ME.

So I can go back to it, analyze it, read it again, and decide if there’s anything in this (or in anything I write) in terms of understanding a lot of things you cannot even imagine. I don’t want to know what you think, curiosity is just annoys me, leave me alone.

You don’t know me, you have never lived in my skin, you have never met me, you have not walked in my shoes, and you have never slept with me in a bed you have never crawled into. Do not respond. You are not the point, and, frankly, the reader is a donkey’s ass.

I am sick and tired of all the bullshit I get from people who have no fucking clue as to what they’re talking about.

It’s an inner dialogue, can you get it. Leave it alone, and leave me alone.

This is how I cope. Nothing more.

I will not read whatever you send me about this piece. No one reads this blog and that is how I want it. I will delete you, I will block you, and I will have nothing to do with you in any way.

Restrain yourself. It’s not about you which is hard for the narcissists among you to fathom, but there it is.

This is stuff for me to deal with and I most certainly do. But it’s not created for you. I am asking you to respect that.

If I get pushback shit from this piece, I will delete it from existence, and I will delete you from my life. If you cannot respect my wishes in this, then, fuck you.