“I -- I lied to you,” he stammered. “... Remember that first night we spent together? You… you asked me if I was clean.”

There was a gap: a single moment where the walls of my understanding shook like waves, and quaked. Where am I? I wondered. The splintering walls jumped open, canyons of darkness pouring out.  

Say it to me: My eyes shaped the demand.

“I… I have herpes, and I lied to you about [my status].”

I am 19 years old.

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It was over a year later that I finally paid for the expensive herpes blood test. When I got the call with the test results -- Herpes Simplex 1 and 2 (HS1 / HS2), both positive -- I was instantly convinced that my life was over. I laid in bed and cried all day.

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Herpes, while relatively harmless in its actual presentation, is a virus that comes with a lot of fear, stigmatization, and loneliness. In receiving my diagnosis, I was faced with the painful culture of the commoditized body, and had to realize that my body had just become worth less. I couldn’t see it then, but I was swimming in an ocean of the internalized narratives of body marginalization that I didn’t even know I had.  It was as if my bones now burned with self-loathing. I thought, “My body is broken; I have become soiled.” Worth less.  I thought, “I am damaged goods,” and that I always would be.

What I couldn’t see then, and has taken me four years to learn, is that my body never was “goods” to begin with. My body -- my incredible, resilient, teaching-me-everyday body -- is my one true home in this lifetime. It is the portal through which I discover the world, and the aliveness which ties me to all beings. Western culture is incredible in the breadth of which it shames bodies: bodies that are too fat, too black, too modified, too hairy, too imperfect when perfection is found only in Photoshop -- every body has something that’s shame-able. Every body is self-conscious, desirous of being accepted and of unconditional love. Every body has a secret, a story, or a shame. But if there’s one thing I’m done hearing about, it’s that bodies are “worthless,” “soiled,” or “damaged.” I’m done hearing that bodies are “workers,” “money,” or “disposable.” My body is the portal through which I discover the world, and the aliveness which ties me to all beings. My body is the lived accumulation of my experience, and there’s no quantifying that.

Even in the darkest hours of my mind: my blood pumps, nourished by my lungs, to the gutters of my injury. My guts discern sustenance from excretion. My body is the metaphor for sound living.

My body is the reality of my life.