Matthew Gallaway

On the George Washington Barge Project

In which The Gay Recluse dreams of stowing away.

There are hundreds of barges that pass by each day.

All of them seem to have cool apartments on board.

We dream of sailing to Australia to visit The Cannanes. 

The Yacoubian Building: Hilarious "Must-Read" for Those Interested in Gay Stereotypes

In which The Gay Recluse reads a book five years later and says wtf.

Last fall, after we posted our thoughts on the suffocation of the gay voice in American literature, a reader suggested that for the sake of comparison we check out The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al Aswany, which said reader described to us -- earnestly, and not without indignation -- as a good example of a gay voice in Egyptian literature. So we bought the book, have finally read it and are now ready to file our report. A little background: the novel was a best seller in Egypt for two years running -- 2002 and 2003 -- and was acclaimed for "breaking taboos" with its "frank sexuality," including (omg!) that of the homo variety; NPR -- among others -- loved it: "Packed with uncomfortable truths," writes Robert Siegel of All Things Considered on the back of our paperback edition, "it is as much about the human condition as the Egyptian character."

The plot is built around an old colonial-era building (the Yacoubian) in downtown Cairo, where the author presents the comings and goings of about a dozen characters, each of whom could be said to represent a segment of Egyptian society. There is a fading aristocrat who spends his time chasing after whores; a corrupt politician who rigs elections and also chases after whores (wait, is this Albany?); a crafty businessman who sells cheap whatever; a couple of whores, who -- because some taboos are not in fact broken -- are lower-class women with no choice but to sell their bodies; a working-class teenage boy who is denied entrance into the state police academy and consequently turns into an Islamic terrorist; and so on. Aswany presents all of this in a lyrical-enough prose that probably explains the NPR infatuation and occasionally offers a glimmer of emotional complexity, or at least enough to carry us through to the end. At times it was enjoyable, albeit in a major-network-mini-series-about-Egypt kind of way, which is to say the characters felt more like placards than people. But because this is about Egypt, we are fascinated! We come away with the sense that just like the United States it is a very corrupt place, ruled by thugs, bourgeois hypocrites and religious fundamentalists. We might have embraced this empty-calories treatment were it not for two more serious flaws: the first is Aswany's treatment of "the gays" in his book, which can be described as unintentionally hilarious but ultimately off-putting. Though Aswany -- unlike most post-war American writers -- must be commended for noting the existence of homosexuality, the book is nevertheless filled with passages such as this:

Homosexuals... often excel in professions that depend on contact with other people, such as public relations, acting, brokering, and the law. Their success in these fields is attributable to their lack of that sense of shame that costs others opportunities, while their sexual lives, filled as they are with diverse and unusal encounters, give them deeper insight into human nature and make them more capable of influencing others.

We wish! Lol!

Or check this out:

[Homosexuals] make themselves known to one another and hold secret conversations by means of hand movements. Thus, if one of them takes the other's hand and strokes his wrist with his finger while shaking it, that means that he desires him, and if a man brings two fingers together and moves them while talking to someone, this means that he is inviting his interlocutor to have sex, and if he points to his heart with one finger, it means that his lover has sole possession of his heart, and so on.

Seriously? -- secret code -- LOL!!! Don't stop, please!!! Hilarious!!!

Or how about Aswany's description of Hatim, the effeminate (which is to say, half-French) newspaper reporter:

He tries...with practiced touches, to bring out the feminine side of his beauty. He wears transparent gallabiyas embroidered with beautiful colors over his naked body, is clean-shaven, applies an appropriate and carefully calculated amount of eye pencil to his eyebrows, and uses a small amount of eye shadow. Then he brushes his smooth hair back or leaves stray locks over his forehead. By these means he always attempts, in making himself attractive, to realize the model of the beautiful youth of ancient times.

Get it? He's womanly or "passive" because "tough" guys don't like to get fucked -- lol!

Or this:

With his smart clothes, svelte figure, and fine French features, he would look like a scintillating movie star were it not for the wrinkles that his riotous life has left on his face and that sad, mysterious, gloomy look that often haunts the faces of homosexuals.

Now we know why we look so sad and gloomy -- damn!

So you get the point. When it comes to the gays, Aswany trades in nothing but stereotypes. And btw (spoiler alert!) guess which character literally gets his head smashed in by his (masculine, married) lover at the end of the book? Moral of the story: queens (and terrorists, cause the terrorist kid also gets blown away) are degenerates who deserve to die! Meanwhile -- and this is serious problem two, which seeps into our consciousness as we read -- the author has literary aspirations. Here's what he says in an interview:

People say Yacoubian Building was popular because of the sex, exposed corruption, police brutality, etc., but won't acknowledge that, perhaps, it was a good piece of literature.

This? Literature of the good variety? We hate to break it to you, Alaa al Aswany, but in this case "People" are right! Let us get on our soapbox for a moment and say that one job of literature is to deconstruct stereotypes, or at least demonstrate to the reader some awareness that you are using them for a reason, whether irony, sarcasm or humor. And we don't care where you're from: please don't ask us to consider your work "literature" when you give us characters that have no bearing on the complicated truth of the world you so carelessly ignore. [And as a final note, fuck Robert Siegel -- who endorsed the idea that it was "controversial" to make a newspaper editor gay -- and everyone else who reviewed this positively without slamming the idiotic (if at times hilarious) ignorance that seeps from its pages.]

On the George Washington Bird Project: March 24, 2008

In which The Gay Recluse takes pictures and displays ignorance.

First, a note from our new friend and GreenCine film critic James Van Maanen, who writes (with regard to the below shot): Is that first picture of a hawk, maybe? (I ask, because we are getting a number of here out here in Jackson Heights of late. Much to the dismay of our pigeons and other smaller birds & rodents.)

Thanks for the note, Jim! We were kind of hoping that it was an American Kestrel, mostly because it's the title of a record our band once released. What we really need is for someone like the guy who wrote this post to point us in the right direction! We love this guy, not only for his enthusiasm for the birds of Upper Manhattan, but for his appreciation of the ruined state of affairs that marks our existence up here:

As we walk along the neglected park, I can only wish that the wealth of the Central Park Conservancy could somehow also adopt these little green strips and return them to the glory of years past. Northern Manhattan deserve parks without crack pipes, weeds and broken glass.

So true! But since we're here to talk about birds and not ruins, we now present our latest batch of photographs, all taken on Saturday afternoon as we hiked along the forgotten piece of land that lies between the train tracks and the Hudson, north of the bridge and south of Dykeman. It is an oddly desolate place, filled with debris, gnarled trees and -- yes! -- birds.

This is Manhattan!? Believe it.

Could you be a white-breasted nut-job nuthatch?

Another view. Different bird. Beautiful tail.

Is this the same as number one above? Or something different? (How clueless are we?)

Could these be chicks? Or wrens? Or sparrows? (Thankfully, our field guide is in the mail.)

We might not be cut out for birding, after all, at least the up-close variety. We're pretty sure this is a lowly seagull, but we still love to watch them fly. 

On the Moors of Washington Heights

In which The Gay Recluse celebrates Easter.

It was not until eleventh grade -- in Mrs. S____'s English class -- that we began to appreciate the obsessive and illogical side of literature, which of course is to say we were reading Wuthering Heights. Do you remember Mrs. S____? How thin and small and severe she was? How nobody in any of her classes -- even E.B. the genius and teacher's pet -- ever got more than a B+ (and how he almost had a nervous breakdown as a result)? We hardly need to mention how she kept her hair pulled back in a tight bun; how she wore those awful brown skirts and high-necked blouses (we all wondered: who exactly was her husband?); or how 98 percent of her classes were deadly boring. That was all a given. What we didn't expect was that on a cold spring day much like we've been having lately, when everything is still barren but the light betrays a certain expectancy, Mrs. S___ would suddenly pivot around from where she had been writing something irrelevant on the chalk board to address us in a harsh, desperate tone that seemed to belong to someone else entirely. We were about to make the transition to the less passionate half of the book -- the second generation -- and Mrs. S____ wanted to emphasize exactly what we were leaving behind; she began to describe the moors, and how she liked to visit every few years, not because she wanted to see where Emily Brontë had lived and died -- that she had already done -- but to remember how the landscape was haunted by the spirits of Heathcliff and Catherine; and then she defied any of us to walk through the moors in the fading twilight, as the mist begins to meander above the heather, and tell her that we didn't believe that these characters were so much more than words on a page, that they weren't windows into the deepest recesses of the human soul, where love and hate could rip you apart. It was an episode that always remained with us; we remembered it today, in fact, as we walked through the heather gardens in Washington Heights. We thought of all the thousands of hours we spent in the classroom, both before and after this this strange incident -- although in retrospect, it was probably a performance -- and how only this stayed with us. This is why we feel so grateful to Mrs. S____. At least for those two or three minutes, she unveiled herself as someone completely -- and unapologetically -- possessed by her love for something irrational and unobtainable; and really, what else could you ever want (or need) to know?

There is no life higher than the grasstops Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind Pours by like destiny, bending Everything in one direction. I can feel it trying To funnel my heat away. If I pay the roots of the heather Too close attention, they will invite me To whiten my bones among them. Sylvia Plath, from "Wuthering Heights"

On The George Washington Bridge Project (Special Post-Apocalypse Edition)

In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with The George Washington Bridge.

Time and Date of morning photograph: March 21, 2008, 5:15pm-ish. Notes: This is the view of the George Washington Bridge from the north, in the remotest and most abandoned part of Manhattan. We see the pilings of an old pier and -- most bizarrely -- the remains of a sidewalk. There is some sort of twisted metal carcass, somewhat grotesquely left behind by the tide. Everything is rusting and the rocks are a disturbing tone of green. We get the sense that this is what New York City will look like in 10,000 years.

Did this sidewalk wash ashore, or did it just collapse? In either case, we weren't expecting to see it.

This was the first attempt at the George Washington Bridge, which as you can see didn't quite work out. We're not sure why they put it here.

Another view of the discarded "first draft" of the GWB. More importantly: who took the time to paint patterns on the rusted beams?

On Proof that the Sun Sets Magnificently, Even Over New Jersey

In which The Gay Recluse watches the sunset, craves a gin-and-tonic and converses with a higher power. Time and Date of Photographs: 7:15ish, March 20, 2008 Notes: All sunset photos are inherently cheesy -- obviously -- but sometimes we have to get in touch with our inner tourist.

God: Don't let your youth go to waste! Us: Ughh -- it's too late! We're turning "30" next week!!!

God: Do you like Netflix? Us: Yes!!!

God: What's up with that shitty-looking building on the left (I mean, right)? Us: Good question!! It costs a lot of money to live there!!! 

On The Gay Uncle's Guide To Parenting

In which The Gay Recluse breathes a sigh of relief and encourages everyone to buy a book.

Recently we read The Gay Uncle's Guide To Parenting by Brett Berk and learned that the world is filled with these strange creatures called "children," which -- somewhat alarmingly -- are the by-product and responsibility of an even stranger (and infinitely more damaged) group of people known as "parents." Children, it seems, are like pets to the extent that they need to be taken care of all the time, but they are a lot smarter: some can even talk! Otherwise, children seem to be pretty cool: they like to play and eat and make friends and build stuff and basically have a lot of fun in their miniature but wildly imaginative minds. True: sometimes they cry, are annoying or even throw tantrums because they are overwhelmed, which is less fun. Parents, however, are another story! It's hard to imagine a more neurotic, stressed-out group. For starters, many of them never go out for drinks, which makes them oddly insulated; they have a tendency to buy way more things than their kids actually need; they feed their children a lot of junk; they won't let their kids sleep; they tell the stupidest and most confusing lies to their kids; they threaten their children with outlandish scenarios that they can never follow through on; they "home-school" their children. In short, parents do all sorts of crazy, stupid shit that seems all but certain to give their children major complexes that will undoubtedly take years and years on the therapist's couch to unravel. Reading this, we were continually left with the question: must parents be so stupid? Fortunately, they now have help. Brett Berk -- in the form of The Gay Uncle -- provides an entire book's worth of sound advice (at least as far as we can tell; remember, we didn't even know what children were!) on how parents can escape their "bubbles" and raise children with some modicum of sanity. This is fun reading: unlike us, Brett has a lot of experience dealing with kids and parents (he ran a pre-school in the East Village!) and tells great stories to drive home his points. In what is probably our favorite chapter on making friends, he describes an improbable bond between a little girl who is a bit of a straight arrow and a boy who is a free spirit; the girl's parents -- needless to say -- are not happy about this and refuse to make a "play date," although the boy's mother is quite amenable to the idea. Berk says: "I've found that when parents express reservations about their kid's friendships, the problem is more often rooted in an internal conflict of their own rather than anything having to do directly with their child." (Berk's itals, not ours.) Berk would be annoying and overbearing at times if it were not for the fact that (besides being well qualified; he even has an M.S. Ed), he is very cognizant of his annoying and overbearing tendencies, and even better -- a true queen! -- uses this to great comic effect: "I wanted to offer some advice. But...I went for distraction instead. 'Hummus, anyone?'" (This as a boy in the process of toilet training lays a turd on Berk's front porch.) In short, this is a book you will want every parent to have; the only question -- given the above -- is how to get it to them. We recommend buying a few copies and surreptitiously (or even "accidentally") leaving one behind whenever appropriate. There are a lot of parents in the world, and apparently they still need lots of help. Why not let The Gay Uncle come to the rescue? Brett Berk is currently on a book tour. He is a very entertaining reader: if you can, go see him! For information on that and all things Gay Uncle, visit his blog (brettberk.com). 

On the Death of the Winter Garden: The Mythical Hellebore Awakes!

In which The Gay Recluse retreats to our garden in Washington Heights.

As it has done for thousands of years -- and not just in our garden -- the hellebore has sent forth the most beautiful, delicate blossoms at this improbable juncture, as if to taunt winter into sending one last storm. (Let's hope nobody is provoked.)

A white flower.

A pink flower.

A black flower (the rarest and most temperamental of all the hellebores, it is said to have killed Alexander The Great).

[This post is dedicated to Stephen -- great lover of hellebores -- who is (omg!) stuck in Pittsburgh!] 

On Gay Modern Love: Kayla Rachlin Small Responds and Transcends

In which The Gay Recluse provides a postscript to our gay alternative to this week's Modern Love piece in the Times by Kayla Rachlin Small. (For those looking for our informal-but-telling quantitative analysis of Modern Love, click here.)

Dear TGR,

I loved your riff on "The Steep Price of Your Forbidden Kiss" (a title which, for the record, was not of my choosing).Your version worked for me because I've long thought about the connection between disease and homosexuality (as forms of alterity, and as challenges to our culture definition of pathology). But moreso, it made me proud as hell, because it got to the heart of the issue upon which Thomas and I most differed. To me, illness is a culture, an identity, a political issue. It's a status that 99% of the world sees as unfortunate and oppressive. I’ve been bombarded with the message that if I were a good person, I would say "CF doesn't define me!!" and "CF is not an issue in relationships." I have never been able to say those things. I majored in Cultural Anthropology because I wanted to study subcultures and the Other and the ways in which those positionalities inform our values and symbols. I leeched onto gay narratives because in them I saw community and art and rejection of norms, and I believed I would someday find cystic versions of all that. Eventually, painfully, I learnt that there was little CF community and even less CF pride (Permanent banishment from the healthy population isn't something one is encouraged to flaunt. Everyone wants to be healthy, goes the wisdom.) I know now that I love all those gay stories and films because each one makes me briefly believe in the promise of a parallel culture that I may never get. Every July, the Gay Pride parade makes me incredibly sad, because there it is in front of me, the constitutional right to assembly put to the best use, and that was exactly what I couldn't do with "my people" because of cross-infection risks. This "wishing to embrace my disease and wave my freak flag"was precisely where Thomas' personal culture diverged from my own. "The only thing I want is to be a regular Joe, just normal," he told me. My response was, "I want the opposite." One day as we waited in line at the cinema I pointed out a poster for X-Men: The Last Stand and said "I wish we could see that." He scoffed. A few weeks later, when we were joking about our genes, I referred to myself as a mutant. He said, "I've told you, X-Men is not real." Of course it's real, I wanted to tell him. It's a metaphor for Otherness. If gay people get to say "this movie stands for us" then certainly us actual genetic mutants should get to do the same? In preparation for the first time Thomas came to my home, I hung a gigantic poster of five drag queens on the back of my bedroom door. I caught glimpses of it while we were having sex. Yes, there I was with someone "like me," but there was something I imagined in that poster that Thomas didn't share: something anti-vanilla, something involving pride, some kind of solidarity. After I moved away from Thomas I thought hard (and wrote hard) about this clash. And this I came to understand: I had my myths just as he had his. It wasn't as though I was honest and he, emulating normal, was in denial; I've played Freak with just as much intentionality. He wasn't so different from me, after all. He had the same desire to belong, to be part of something established and dynamic, to burrow into a community and receive clean lines of self in exchange. The only difference was that he wanted to belong to the Normal and I wanted to belong to the Abnormal. "That's his myth," said my favorite professor when I showed her my first writings about Thomas, in which I excoriated him for being traditional and wanting to blend in. "And you have yours." I currently believe that who I am -- who I see myself -- has almost nothing essential to it. Cystic Fibrosis can't be the thing that's made me, because Thomas (and others) are SO different. Rather, as I wrote in Modern Love, I am a product of the rest of my circumstances and the stories I've loved and the people who have moved me and the things that have seemed available, that have reached out to me as if to say we will work, we will help you, adopt us, we are perfect scaffoldings for these inklings of a story. Disease was the raw material I was given to work with, but the person I became was just one possible result. It's an identity I made for myself just as Thomas made his. All that said, I still love him. But I did move on. I now have a female best friend, M, who also has cystic fibrosis; we share things I could never share with Thomas. Given The Gay Recluse's reinterpretation of my story, I wanted to share this photo of M and I. We once again broke the rules and, unlike Thomas, she was all for documenting it. Finally, a coda to my story: in April 2006 (at which time I'd seen Thomas at our clinic but had yet to speak to him), I visited Berlin. Each time I rode the S-Bahn westwards I passed a building bearing the word UNTOUCHABLE in enormous graffiti. I photographed the building, just like I photographed a Poison Girls Club tank top in a store window, for I believed these things applied to me. A week after I returned from Berlin, Thomas and I went out for the first time. In May 2006, after Thomas and I had abandoned safety precautions for shared beer and body fluids, I went to Berlin again. But when I rode the S-Bahn west I became incredibly confused: where was the UNTOUCHABLE sign? As it turns out, in the five weeks between my visits, part of building had been knocked down. All that remained in view as that train barreled toward Friedrichstrasse station was the graffiti that I'd seen atop Untouchable. It read: SuperGays. I took that second trip to Berlin with a close friend who is a lesbian. We're also both Jewish. One afternoon as we were walking, she told me how much she liked being gay, how she liked having something that made her different. I knew what she meant. I said to her, "You know, if we'd been born fifty years earlier, this, being Jewish, would have been that thing for us. Our defining identity." But we were born when we were, and we each had been Othered in our own way, and I like to think we're damn lucky for that.

Kayla Rachlin Small

First Trip to Berlin: "Untouchable" and "SuperGays"

Second Trip to Berlin: "Supergays"

Kayla and M document a kiss. E-mail Kayla at: kaylarachlinsmall [at] nycmail.com. 

On Gay Modern Love (The Steep Price of Our Forbidden Kiss)

In which The Gay Recluse provides a gay alternative to this week's Modern Love offering in The Times. (Note: For Kayla's response, please click here.)

By KAYLA RACHLIN SMALL and THE GAY RECLUSE

THE rules forbade me from being within three feet of her. I knew those rules; she knew them. Sharing a drink meant coming a yard too close. But I wanted to touch something of hers, to claim my territory. So with an inch of her ale remaining, I reached for Toma's glass and said, "Let me have a sip."

She did nothing to stop me. The liquid disappeared, and with it went the infection-control protocol that had been drilled into us for years.

Like everyone else -- yes, even lesbians -- with cystic fibrosis, Toma and I carry certain bacteria that are harmless to the general population but catastrophic if transmitted to another cystic fibrosis patient. Our lungs, carpeted with thick, sticky mucus, provide a chemical environment in which typically innocuous germs can wreak havoc, causing more chest infections, more weeks in the hospital and a diminished chance at living into our 30s.

As with sexual orientation, the illness itself is transmitted genetically, so when people slide away from me down the subway bench because of my coughing, they're wasting their energy. I can smear a bacteria like s.maltophilia over the tester lipsticks in Sephora and no one will be harmed. But stand too close to another person with cystic fibrosis, and I could kill them, or myself.

Sometimes I dream of leper colonies. I ache for my vision of quarantine: an apartment with others like me that has a medicine room instead of a medicine cabinet. Since I was a preteenager, I've mythologized this community, longed to mooch pills off a friend and compare vein sizes, in a niche where tired explanations ("This is normal. I;m always on antibiotics. I've always liked girls") give way to brainstorming T-shirt slogans or confessing to that single cigarette.

Being with Toma gave me that. I met her on a January afternoon when I sat down a few seats away in the clinic waiting room. At the time, we both had staph growing in our lungs, but we didn't yet harbor the more virulent bacteria concomitant with cystic fibrosis. Neither of us could catch anything that we didn't already have.

Still, contact wasn't encouraged, and we kept our distance. Her eyes fell upon my fishnets as the nutritionist ushered me out of her office; I gazed at her oxfords as she followed her back in.

The next time our clinic dates coincided, she asked if I wanted to get lunch. Over hamburgers, she told me about postcollege life. She had car payments and medical bills and rounds at the pub.

A geologist, she was working only three days a week. It wasn't enough money, but it gave her more time for horseback riding, which she loved and wouldn't be physically able to do five years down the road. Her lungs were O.K. for now, but there were the nonpulmonary complications, sinusitis and arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome.

"I know," I said, thinking of my own intestinal drama. "I had to take Klean-Prep twice this week." The hamburger's taste was heavy in my mouth; I stared at a clump of gum in the ashtray, wishing I had a piece so I'd be prepared for a kiss.

As we said goodbye, we moved to hug, then stopped. I wondered if I had overestimated her tolerance; maybe my uncensored accounts of viscera had been too much. Or maybe she was just shy. Or maybe she didn't want to break the rules.

I had already lost too much to the rules: mothers in waiting rooms asked me to sit farther away from their daughters; or nurses telling me to move back from my doorway because I was in isolation, and too close to the hallway. My summer-school house mother had sat me down saying, "There's another lesbian in our dorm with cystic fibrosis." I lit up at the news, but she wasn't done: "She's been trying to stay away from you."

I had had enough. When I reached for Toma's pint glass on our second date, I was sending the most deliberate and seductive signal possible. She followed my lead. She wrapped an arm around me as we walked. I held her hand, playing with each finger, bulbous at the tip from lack of oxygen. She picked at the hole in my stocking. I traced letters on her back. I leaned against her chest as we sat in plastic seats at the train station, felt her lungs beneath the corduroy and flesh.

We moved quickly after that. Sex held no greater epidemiological risk than casual contact. Our eagerness was partly due to the feeling that we couldn't be rejected by one of our own.

But I didn't lose my vanity, or my neuroses, just because Toma knew my body's dirty secrets. Like anyone, I worried about the spot I missed while shaving and the flab on my stomach.

I could have told her that nutritional deficiency was making my hair fall out; she would have said I needn't apologize. Instead, after a year of treating my withering hair as gently as possible, I bought a blow dryer and fried it straight for her, just as I would have done for any other girl.

I didn't throw myself at Toma in hopes of unconditional acceptance; I did it out of defiance. I didn't care what others thought; or even if they viewed my "real" illness "cystic fibrosis" as a manifestation of my "moral" illness. I wanted to provoke whispers of "How tragic" and "They should have known better" and then rebuke them with a sense of O.K.-ness that our own parents hadn't been able to give us, disease and sexual orientation included (to the extent these conditions can even be separated in the minds of most straight people, which is not very often).

We hadn't meant for it to last. Our first touch, that first shared drink, occurred six weeks before I was to move far away from her. On a horizon marked by unknowable points of decline, questions of when, where, how things would break down, my departure time stood out for its simplicity.

For once, something was certain. Toma didn't have to fear hurting me when her health deteriorated, or being hurt when mine did. Like our bodies, our relationship came including a cause of death.

But disease isn't just biology. Like being gay, it's a personal culture, shaped by stories, by people, by cities, by coincidences. And Toma's was shaped differently.

As our relationship tapered into text messages and the occasional phone call, I dwelled on our conflicting styles of fighting, mentally breaking her down so there would be less to miss. I dated other girls.

But there was a clause in my moving-on project that said: "You can still want, and give yourself, what she promised you. You're still entitled to that."

And so I imagined that when I visited Toma, we would have sex. She would be on standby for when I needed to be reassured, through shared spit and skin, that I wasn't poison, especially not to someone I loved.

Then came a March afternoon when I stood in my dorm room, phone to my ear, and told Toma I would be visiting soon.

"I'm growing cepacia now," she replied.

Burkholderia cepacia: our apocalypse. For us, hearing "cepacia" is equivalent to hearing "Stage IV." But all I heard was: "You can't visit me." That statement slowly evolved into the realization that I was never going to touch Toma again. And as it would be too difficult for us to be in the same room and maintain three feet of separation, I would never see her again, either.

I mourned what cepacia meant for us long before I could acknowledge what it meant for Toma: the devastation it forecast. It could drag a patient's lungs down to useless within a year.

That summer, Toma had announced she was buying herself a model of an Aston Martin for her birthday; driveable midlife-crisis cars aren't priced for 24-year-olds. But it didn't matter that she and I had primed ourselves for death within two decades. We'd had a future, and I wasn't prepared to lose that.

If she was going to decline, I wanted to be dramatic. I wanted to quit college and plant myself at her bedside. I imagined putting my hospital savvy to use, flushing her IV so she wouldn't have to wait for the nurse, procuring her an Xbox from the children's playroom. Although this ultra-competent caretaker side of me had her allure, the truth was I didn't want to watch Toma disintegrate. By being there with her, I would be sentencing myself to the same end.

"Are you willing to risk your life for her?" a friend asked.

I wasn't.

SO for the second time, I tried to forget Toma. I told myself she was supposed to be one episode, not my entire story. I had wanted to love someone with my disease, and I did.

But what about sitting next to her at the movies, listening as a character onscreen quipped, "I have a lethal disease," Toma responded, "Join the club," and we laughed, and I wasn't the only one for whom it turned into choking.

Another place, another time, and Toma and I would have been banned from public school, from sleepovers.

But we grew up accumulating germs from sandboxes and stables and sodas. We grew up passing for normal, which meant keeping company with myriad people who -- just as they assumed we were straight -- assumed our coughing was caused by a curable-yet-contagious bug. I remember a group of runny-nosed bunkmates claiming I had made them sick, and the swell of vindication when our counselor told them, "Trust me, you didn't get it from her."

Now, on the subway, I sense a man's glare as I cough into a napkin. He moves a few seats away, and I want to say to him: "I can't hurt you. You can keep scowling at me until one of us gets off. You can catch my eyes and try to pull them up to the posters warning New Yorkers about the flu, but there's no reason for me not to be here."

Except I'm envisioning Toma, alive but inaccessible to me over the last eight months. And the next time the man glares at me, I actually share his desire to see me exiled. I'm thinking: You want me away from you healthy people? Away from the breeders? Quarantined along with people who sound like me?

Some days, I want that, too.

Kayla Rachlin Small, a recent Columbia University graduate, lives in New York City.