Editor’s Note: This marks the first in a series of articles dealing with personal narratives and perspectives focused on HIV/AIDS. For more information on this particular series of articles, please read the editor’s introduction here.

I was standing in my hallway crying. The TV was blaring from the other room and half of my apartment was flooded with a beam of light from the outside street. There was a soft glow around my living room and even though it had been a hot, hot Chicago summer day, the wind was starting to pick up and there seemed to be a cooler air wafting toward me.

I continued to stand and stare at my open closet.

At that time I didn’t have many clothes because at that time I didn’t have much money. I was barely into my twenties and I was working at a local club on the north side lip-syncing to famous women and collecting tips from transients five nights a week, doing three shows a day. I lived alone on the second floor above a bar that on the right weekends, could rattle my pots and pans with the techno eighties music and the heart-pounding, disappearing disco. It was my first place by myself — and I loved it. I owned a black couch that sat two if no one ate too much, a black lacquered coffee table, one lamp, a bed, and a bookcase. And my clothes. My clothes that I wore in my daily life consisted of jeans, ripped t-shirts, sneakers, and some extremely wide belts. Most everything I wore that sparkled or had shoulder pads, was kept carefully hung in my dressing room at the club.

And so I stood there, staring at the open door to my closet, wiping my face dry at 3am on that Thursday night, while the breeze drifted in and a spotlight shone off my black coffee table.

‘You’ve got to figure out how to put things together, Alex. You just don’t know how to put things together well. You don’t plan. You need to plan.’

Daphne was right. I didn’t plan. And when I did plan, it was rare that the plan was full proof. Something seemed to always go wrong with the plan. And so I stopped. I then just began going. I just began doing things and moving ahead, and closing my eyes and praying for the best. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t.

Daphne was one of my first friends when I got to the city, and one of the first transgender women I knew. She always reminded me of Dionne Warwick. The same smile, the same cheeks, and the same long legs. We worked together and although we weren’t as close as I would have wanted, she was a good friend. She was kind and thoughtful. She told me stories of her father and his love for cars and trains. She made fabulous stews and once when I was very, very ill with Hepatitis C and yellow from eyeball to toenail, she came over, patted my head with a cold rag, and fed me soup and Saltines. When my family found I was transitioning, they wanted very little to do with me, and Daphne was the start of the family I would begin again. She was my sister.

‘Don’t get married unless you know that after you fight, you’re going to have crazy make up sex.’

When Daphne got sick, I visited her only twice. I was terrified.

This disease wasn’t supposed to hit our community. This cancer was only hitting gay men. It wasn’t hitting us. It wasn’t supposed to. It was only killing gay men who slept with gay men and at the time, even the doctors assured us all we were safe. We knew we had to stop kissing them when they tipped us, and we constantly washed our hands when they held us, but we were told in no uncertain terms, we were going to be fine. And then one day, we weren’t.

Then one day it started to infiltrate our community, and then others, and then it never seemed to stop. There seemed to be a wave swallowing people up one by one as we all found ourselves standing naked on a desert island surrounded by nothing by decay and rotting bodies of people we used to know.

And then Daphne got really sick.

We took her to the free clinic and as we sat in the waiting room with the chorus of coughs and phlegm and collective moans dispersed around the halls and sticking to the sides of us, both Grace and I held Daphne’s head up with each of our hands. It was too late — and we knew that — but we couldn’t let her die without at least attempt something, anything.

But at that time,

when AIDS first hit us, there was nothing. There was this mind blowing-ly expensive drug with three letters that no one could afford, but other than that, there was nothing.

So we wanted her to die with someone at least attempting something. Grace, who was blonde, tall and spoke with hurried authority was the one that piled us all into a cab and sprung for the ride to Cook County Hospital. Grace always had plans that seemed to work.

A doctor saw her later that night, and put her in a room with two other patients, both slowly fading away from the same thing. Grace, myself, and three others sat around their beds holding their hands, weeping and occasionally leaving to pee, eat, or go to work. It was the most time I had spent with Daphne since I began working with her only a year ago.

I remember going home one night from the hospital, and sitting on the edge of my bed and staring at the wall. Thinking nothing. Feeling nothing. Hearing, smelling, being nowhere and doing absolutely nothing. My eyes needed to close and my chest ached for a breath, but I seemed helpless.

I was weak and debilitated from the death and the sorrow that, every single day, seemed to close in on me. And Grace would call every now and then:

‘Did you read the paper today?’ she’d huff quickly.

That was the only way we could tell for certain if someone else we knew was still alive. And she’d loan me a black dress and off we’d go to another burial.

I was only twenty-something and someone I knew was slowly dying next to two people I didn’t know and the average age in that hospital room was mine.

The three people that lie shitting on themselves, and drooling and frying like a boiled egg at night, and unable to hear, walk or smile, were all my age. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This couldn’t possibly have been part of anyone’s grand plan.

Who would have thought this was humanly acceptable? I couldn’t stop staring and I couldn’t move. I wanted to rage and shriek and gesture and throw myself out the window but instead, I sat in the edge of my bed and stared at the wall.

And then I got up, went to the kitchen, and made two cans of Campbell’s chicken soup which I took to Daphne later that afternoon.

When I got to the hospital one night after my show, her bed was tightly made with a fresh pillow and clean sheets. I stood at the doorway and looked at the other two young men in half paper dressing gowns, drenched in their own sweat but sleeping soundly, and leaned against the door. It was after visiting hours, but there was a nurse who worked the night shift that I’d gotten friendly with, and occasionally, she’d let me break some rules. I walked over to Daphne’s bed and sat down. I put my hand on the new pillow. I sat and sobbed as quietly as I could trying my best not to wake up one of the two boys. I put my hand to my mouth and breathed in. There were tears falling so hard. I barely inhaled. They were weighted. They fell out of me. It was death and it was sudden and it was unfair and horrible and too soon. I couldn’t make any sense of it. And there I sat, surrounded by the future of our community as the two boys lay snoring and slipping away faster than anyone of us could bear.

And so as the spotlight started to shift a little in my living room, and as the breeze got even cooler, I remembered Daphne and stood in front of my closet. I thumbed through the four or five black dresses I’d bought since that particular death. I pushed them aside one by one and tried to find one that didn’t have a memory attached, a funeral I hadn’t been to, a eulogy I hadn’t heard. Daphne passed only a year before, and there I was standing in front of more black outfits that I’d ever thought I’d collect, to wear to more services than I ever thought was possible.

And so I closed the door, and thought maybe Grace wouldn’t mind if I wore blue for her. She loved blue. She gave me a pair of blue opera gloves once because she said:

‘Glamour isn’t a statement, girl. It’s a lifestyle.’

And so I decided to wear those.

Daphne was right. I didn’t plan well. I didn’t plan well at all. But then, who in their right mind would have ever thought to plan for this?