My Spirit Guide
I have a thousand spirit guides. WTF, I’m a whore, remember.
This particular spirit guide knew all the places I wanted to travel to so I might dig up shit on war. A war on war on war on war.
We bonded.
I went to pick كفيل up as we were going out on a trek into the bush. I do not know why they call it the bush. In the entire country, there was one bush in a hotel lobby. And it was plastic. His mother wanted to meet me. And, frankly, I wanted to meet her.
The mud hut smelled badly.
She had to be all of fifty pounds, and she could not walk. She was on a mattress and covered by a blanket. I fucking know AIDS when I see it. She knew I knew.
كفيل made tea.
It was all they had.
I took كفيل to the market on the main dirt road. It’s a lively place where livestock is traded and food is for sale. We brought food back to his mother’s mud hut. No fridge. No electric. No safe drinking water. The toilet was a ditch.
I wanted to photograph ancient sites where rebel soldiers had shot up the landscape so badly, you could barely recognize these places and the ruins there as being of any significance to the past. Entire civilizations vanished.
Not unlike the way in which we will vanish, too. We cannot envision ourselves as having vanished. But the sand can.
Our paths, like our spirit guides, are dust.
We do not really even have a past. We are what we are here and now. As a species, we do not merit a past. We have shit on the earth as if it were a ditch.
We were having lunch in the jeep when I asked كفيل if he had ever had an HIV test.
He thought I meant a school test.
I tried explaining AIDS as best I could.
He kept his eyes down, locked onto the sand that softly blew around any and all ankles in tiny whirlywinds.
The next day, I drove كفيل to a city where he could be tested.
I don’t have much luck with this stuff. Everyone I knew was either dead or barely surviving. Just knowing me is not unlike the Angel of Death has just ate your house.
Back in my poor excuse for a hotel room, I crawled under the bed with the roaches and their friends. And wept. I do that a lot. I never want to come out from under the bed. You have to pull me.
How hot was it.
Fucking hot. I wanted to put him on the plane with me.
That could not happen. كفيل would never have known how to cope with the world I came from any more than I fit into his home.
His mother died. He died, too.
In America, they think AIDS is over. The politically correct in the gay community does not want you to particularly know how difficult living and struggling with HIV really is. Still.
I am not a part of that community.
I see no spirit guides there. Only people who want something.
It is my fault. I have never tried to live among them.
My flight got called. Everyone and everything eased into the kind of slow motion paralysis that reminded me of Southern bullsnakes on a Baptist afternoon. The baby attic rats are safe until the bullsnake comes, and the bullsnake always comes.
Before I could grab my bag, كفيل kissed me fully on the lips.