And I mean that. Like, no funny shit.
Black folks have a tendency to wish, but I’ll be perfectly caucausion today and offer you hope. I hope you catch it all in one fell swoop—skip the whole HIV and jump straight to AIDS with the opportunistic infection already attached. I hope you baffle the medical industry with a never-before-seen case. I hope your blood is made legend for how quickly it gets to the point and cuts out the middleman.
Usually, AIDS is only the result of the contraction and progression of HIV. Usually, AIDS is a disease quite literally, absolutely, scientifically impossible to catch—but fuck that! I hope you catch AIDS like an American. I hope you catch it like a flyaway baseball approaching slowly from the heavens. I hope everyone surrounding you in the bleachers hoists you in the air and AIDS lands gently into your hand-me-down mitten. I hope the entire stadium erupts in cheer and Harold Steinbrenner renames the Yankees in your honor.
I hope your faggy ass catches it at twelve years old while jerking off to the image of your twenty-something math teacher. I hope the picture of his biceps edging over a desk sparks a flame in you until… a miracle. Twelve year old you reborn a sickly virgin Mary. I hope every sacred space in the world praises your name.
I hope you catch AIDS—despite how biologically impossible that is. I hope everyone else with AIDS looks on in awe of you. I hope your AIDS becomes the new craze. I hope everyone with HIV shuts down their blogging accounts—now cognizant of taking up too much space in the conversation. I hope you are researched by graduate students at John Hopkins, and your blood is discovered to be the key to the survival of all of our perishing bees.
I hope you catch AIDS—and die. The dying is my true hope. I hope you die with $40 in your pocket and 40 T-Cells in your blood. I hope you die despite the medical professionals’ best efforts, and the Oprah interview you are still scheduled to do. I hope you fuck up Oprah’s programming. I hope the entire government collapses beneath her anger towards you, and everyone becomes their own president.
I hope the AIDS you caught kills you while you’re using a public restroom, drinking someone’s backwashed diet Coca-Cola, chewing your fingernails, flirting at the DMV, peeing on a bush, spitting at a police officer, voting for a presidential candidate, scrolling through Grindr, scrolling through Farmers Only, holding the door for a stranger, crying at a Nicki Minaj concert, smoking weed at the pier, getting the lawnmower from the basement, licking the ice cream dripping down your cone, brushing the lint off your date’s face, proposing in a crowded ice skating rink, farting on a Brooklyn bound 3 train…
I hope you die in your childhood bed with everyone you have ever loved surrounding you, all returned from the time they loved you the most. All of them staticky and clamoring, whispering, “If he had to die, at least it was like this.”
At least it would be a death ruled special. An unheard of sort of ending. The antithesis of ordinary. An undermining of nature. A medical anomaly. The one who caught the disease fully bloomed, and who did not need to water anything. I hope you catch AIDS and die because how many of us are given the privilege of a death shared by no one else in the entire world.
And I like to think that this is what they mean.
I like to believe that when Cardi said, “I hope your fucking mom catch AIDS, bitch,” she was contemplating the existential crisis of being. I like to believe she was jostling with the cliché of death, exhausted with how rote it all has become in the world and in her own music. That she wanted to offer something different. If someone’s mother had to die, she wanted it to be in a way that no one ever has before—and what a special experience for a child. To know that the only thing that could take down their mother was the impossible.
I like to believe Summer Walker chose the word “infested” when saying, “suck a fat stankin uncircumcised HIV infested dick,” in order to connote something familial. As if to say, the body, too, can act as a house, overrun with so many more vibrant, scurrying living things fighting to survive. What a beautiful image—infested. Inside of all of us a community that is steadily growing, learning, rebelling, evolving—us all our own little countries.
I like to believe that every homophobe that screams, “catch AIDS and die,” while my partner and I are holding hands on the street actually just wants us to feel special. That each hope for my demise I receive in my inbox is actually a proclamation of what this world owes me, and people like me. Because if not this, then what?
If not an acknowledgement of how powerful we are, then why is this nonsensical, medically impossible, asinine statement hurdled from so many mouths? Smeared on so many bathroom stalls? Scratched across the face of so many year book pictures? Saying that you wish I am shot, or hit by a bus, or pushed off a building is far more precise—the kind of death you can count on.
When you tell me you hope my death is via “catching AIDS.” What you are saying is you want me to live forever, or at least until a miracle occurs. And in response I say, “Thank you!” This world can keep the bullet, I’ll take the impossible death. I wonder what kind of heaven that sort of passing would offer me. I wonder if God would wash my feet when I arrive—impressed by the way I cracked her so delicate design.
Timothy DuWhite is a black, queer, poz-writer/artist based out of Brooklyn, NY. A majority of his work circles around the intersections of state & body, state & love, and state & mind. All Timothy desires is a different/newer world for his sha-daughters, and believes the written word is one tool that could be used towards achieving that goal.
