Sit Down First

Warm wraps, a borrowed bed, and someone saying the letters HIV in passing. That’s how it started. We were crammed into a friend’s place, watching something forgettable off the internet, when the subject came up—casual, incidental, already moving on. Starts like the flu. Goes quiet for a decade. Then finds you. I’d heard this a thousand times before. But that night the thought burrowed in and refused to leave, and I lay there in the dark running inventory on my entire body while everyone else slept.

The next morning I did what any sensible person does: I opened a browser and diagnosed myself. Fatigue. Constant. Headaches. Obviously. Rash on my right thigh—yes, actually, there it was. Diarrhea. A cough that felt like my lungs were filing for separation. General malaise, persistent and diffuse. Check, check, fucking check. The internet is such a fat asshole. You know it won’t fix anything and you go anyway, and an hour later you’re deep in late-stage literature and your hands are shaking.

I spent a solid week absolutely convinced I had HIV. Final stage, in all likelihood. Not much left on the clock. I watched YouTube videos of young guys who’d been infected but remained inexplicably upbeat about the whole thing. Documentaries on antiretroviral research breakthroughs. Blogs by gay men who’d been fighting it for years. Advice pieces on how to break the news to your family, your coworkers, your teammates, your girlfriend, the person you’d been sleeping with. I read all of it. I bookmarked it. I was preparing.

So I went to the Berlin AIDS clinic for a rapid test. The waiting room was plastered with brochures about sexually transmitted infections, homosexuality, and weekly barbecues for patients and their loved ones. I already saw myself as a full member of some earnest neighborhood support circle in Wedding, finally finding genuine friendship and probably the love of my life—all catalyzed by an aggressive killer virus. Maybe my real life was only now beginning.

Detlev and Roman in the hallway were friendly. The camp receptionist was friendly. The counselor who talked too much was friendly. The slightly round doctor was friendly. Everyone was aggressively, touchingly friendly. Was this my first test, they asked? Yes, I said, embarrassed. After the blood draw came the thirty-minute wait, and I decided to take it outside—there was a small park around the corner, a wooden bench. In thirty minutes, an uncomfortable amount can cycle through your head.

I thought about who might have handed me this. Because alongside certain genuinely lovely women who had graced my life with their presence, there had also been others—the ones you end up with when nothing better is available, or when you only find out six months later that she’d been working her way through the city’s amateur football league (first team and veterans), which she had apparently framed as a great romance. Or when you were so drunk you were lucky to wind up with someone female at all.

My entire sexual history played out on that bench like a highlight reel. Sabrina at some miserable village party—she was sixteen, which at the time I’d told myself was somehow fine, in the way that seventeen-year-olds tell themselves things are fine. Bianca, who had a nickname in our circle that translated roughly to "fuck trophy" and had been thoroughly earned. There was something off about her anyway, a smell I’d filed away and chosen not to examine. And Melanie. God, Melanie. Haven’t heard from her in years. Is she even still around?

Sitting there on that bench, having spent seven days convincing myself of the worst and stacking every minor symptom into evidence and seeing even the most beautiful women in my life as potential vectors—the fear was real. Shit-yourself scared. The kind where you start mentally rehearsing sentences you hope you’ll never have to say out loud.

Back in the waiting room they called my anonymous number. I yelled "Here!" louder than necessary and stumbled to the front desk. My counselor glanced at the document that apparently held my entire fate, and then said something like: Er—right—let’s go into the consultation room. More private in there. A pause. Sit down first.

Sit down first. Sit down first. I wanted to call my mother. I wanted to sprint to the nearest church and confess everything, including things that hadn’t technically been sins. I wanted to build a time machine and travel back six years to slap the horny idiot version of myself across the face before he made certain choices involving Sabrina. Anything but sit down. Sitting down meant it was real. Sitting down meant we were about to have a very different kind of conversation.

The test was negative. Obviously. If it hadn’t been, this would have been written in a register so soaked in melancholy and hard-won humility it would have broken something in you. She just wanted to walk me through what a rapid test looked like and collect the fifteen euros. That was all. My life was continuing. No barbecues with support groups, no new friends at the Wedding AIDS club, no great love story set against a backdrop of failing immune systems. I was almost disappointed.

I’d expected a moment—the moment, specifically, where everything snaps into clarity and suddenly you understand what matters. You book a flight to Tokyo. You give money to children who need it. You stop wasting your days in an office and start actually living. The curtain parts. I waited for it. It didn’t come. We went to Kreuzberg, poured beer and MDMA into ourselves, and danced until sunrise in some basement that smelled like other people’s sweat. Mostly because the next day was a public holiday.

The epiphany never arrived. The gratitude never crystallized into anything durable. And I understand why—because moments like that are only legible in the instant, and because too many people sit in that same waiting room and hear something they can’t un-hear, and because HIV and AIDS are still out there, still real, still killing people who did nothing to deserve it. What stayed with me instead was quieter and more practical: a recalibration. The next time I’m about to leave the condom in my jacket pocket out of laziness or wishful thinking or whatever story I’m telling myself in the moment, something will be there to cut through it. A voice that knows where that bench is. That says: don’t be an idiot. Who knows what’s been in there. Or better yet—put it back, go home, have a nice evening. Warm wraps. A bad movie. Good company.