Delilah had forgotten how terribly strange and depressing it could get in her own head, given the right circumstances. The right circumstances at the moment happened to be an emptied bottle of pills and a bottle of Southern Comfort, now at the half-empty stage. Her eyes blazed with bitter internalized angst, and she peered around herself through a hazed fog. The room that Delilah had called home for the past six months and finally felt safe and comfortable in had metamorphosed into utterly alien territory. It seemed liked eons of suspended time since she had last gotten wasted, and the liquor burned with the intensity of liquid magma. Likewise, the emotional storm inside of her was swirling outward into the real world. The intensity of her simultaneous rage and depression charged the air, and were painted on the contours of her face.

There was a quick rap of a knock at her bedroom door. She was sprawled about two feet away, bottle of booze in hand, facing the door. To her shock, it swung open not five seconds later, and she was looking into the face of her roommate.
The familiar face spilled forth, �Dude, you�ll never guess who�.� And clipped off suddenly. The excited expression of anticipated gossip drooped into nothingness, and then into severe shock. Whatever piece of news Alex was about to say was instantly forgotten.

�What the fuck are you doing? Have you lost your mind?� Then, Alec�s stormy eyes darted from her and the Southern Comfort (which wasn�t doing a good job at being comforting in a Southern, or even Northern, way) to the open pill bottle inscribed with his name that was lying open and pillaged near her right ankle. He suddenly laughed in a bizarre, nervous way. �Those pills were on my dresser, weren�t they?� He asked inquiringly. Delilah nodded, looking away like a dog being scolded after being caught shitting on the rug. �You�re fucking dumb!� He blurted out. �This kind of craziness is way too gothic for you.� She said nothing. �Those weren�t whatever you thought they were�they were just vitamins I was storing in the empty bottle. I can�t believe you just tried to kill yourself with my vitamins. What the hell is going on with you?�
Vitamins! Vitamins�her mind repeated the term over and over and over, trying to forge some sense of all that it meant�. She had just taken a whole bottle of vitamins. Yes, indeedy, she was an idiot. There went her one attempt at finalization, at escape, at numbness. Would she ever have the guts to do it again?

�Damn it.� She gasped. �I just got drunk after being clean and sober for a year for nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. It feels like every cell in my body is screaming. And, worst of all, I am still alive to deal with all of this.� Then, she said under her breathe, �I should just throw myself out of your window, right in the middle of 3rd Avenue traffic.�

�Huh?� Alec asked, leaning nearer so he could hear.

�Nothing.� She sighed defeatedly. That kind of drama just wasn�t her style at all. All this wrapped itself around her mind, weaving in and out of its nodules, making slow progress as the thought processes were in dire competition with the alcohol�s rhythmic pounding. She contemplated the vitamin suicide for a moment. Then, it all shut down.

She burst out crying, the loud hiccupy kind, a kind of bare-all tear-jerking that was so unlike her. She was a tough hard-core chick, not a whiner, definitely not a bitcher. Alec had never seen her leak and moan like a sick child. He was shocked. The flee response hit Alec like a brick, but his hidden nurturing instinct crushed it in a paternal way. He rushed across the few feet that separated them, and grabbed her, hard, letting the sobs rake across his chest. She resisted, and then let his comfort pervade her distressed soul, allowing the pain to flow out and her mind to settle down. Delilah clutched him like a lover.

�I found out late yesterday afternoon. I didn�t want to tell anyone I was even getting tested. I was so fucking scared. I almost didn�t go back for the results. There was this lurking feeling that the news was going to be really bad. I just couldn�t shake it off, no matter how optimistic I tried to make myself. Anyway, I went in to get my test results and it was like my life came to a grinding halt. I could tell when I looked into that woman�s face what she was going to say. I had run the scenario through my head so many times already. I knew she was going to say I tested positive for HIV, and I even knew what I was going to do today.�

She stopped to hiccup, allowing thick cinnamon odors to leak out of her mouth, rolled her eyes, and continued.

�I have a pretty dark mind sometimes. I had already played out the test results, and many ways I could deal with them. I was going to just go shoot a gram of tar, but I was worried I couldn�t find a vein. I blew them all a long time ago. Guns are too hard to get, and I�ve slashed my wrists before and never died. So, this is what I decided to do. Take all of your sleeping meds. Only they were vitamins! The whole thing is just way too unfair. I had just gotten my life together, gotten clean and went back to school. It was like all of my small dreams and hopes were beginning to come true. And then this happened- I don�t know why I bothered to try to sort shit out. My higher power is either non-existent, or sicker than most human beings. My life was given back, and then yanked right out from under me.�

She paused there for a long while, leaving Alec utterly speechless. Finally, she said �I even know how, when, and where I caught it. I guess I might as well tell you about it.�

The Casa Loma hotel was nestled on an unsuspecting corner in the Lower Haight area. Looking at it, an average person would never guess or even vaguely imagine the kinds of depraved things that went down inside. When you walked in the door, it would envelope you, sucking you into its dreary depths. Single occupancy hotels were one of the few places that junkies, GA recipients, and other street folk who made their cash on a day to day basis could call home. It was hardly even that, though, because even if you managed to make enough dough scrounging around selling drugs, your body, stealing shit, or developing some less common hustle, you would get kicked out at the end of 28 days. The owners didn�t want any permanent residents, because then they had to give you tenant rights. All this contributed to the Casa Loma�s atmosphere of dilapidation and desperation. The walls were all a weird faded grey, which caused your eyes to focus in and out. If you made the bad choice of looking down at the floor, you would see the traces of all sorts of spilled bodily fluids, cigarette and crack pipe burns, and other more disturbing markings, due to their unidentifyability. The building�s three stories seemed to quiver with the weight of discarded dreams, broken aging bodies, and longing.

Phantasmic forms bustled up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night. Nearly everyone was grizzled in one way or another - missing teeth, purple track marks on arms and necks, or limps and funny walks. There were a few single welfare mothers who lived there, but mostly it was either the punk rock kids with their leather, spikes, and emerging addictions, or the frailer, more deformed and experienced junkies. Their shapeless shadows always seemed to be lurching up and down the hall, detached from their bodies.

Delilah�s room wasn�t much different, though she had always liked to think that she was a special breed of junky, that she still had her spirit intact and added a bit of brightness to the lives of those she knew. She didn�t liken herself to the other addicts she knew. She felt saner, more in charge. In reality, though, it was a pretty dreary scene, and she had lost all control long ago. Dirty clothes were piled on the floor and mixed in with the single blanket on her bed. The blanket, as well as many of the clothes, had red blood speckles adorning them. She was pretty consistently unable to search out a vein, so as she did human pin-cushion experiments on herself, little trickles of blood would run down her limbs to catch on whatever material she was struggling upon.

All over the room lay an entourage of discarded needles, lined up on every shred of wood that was considered furniture, doing the rig march of doom. They marched up and down the splintering shelves and lay scattered across the scarred carpeting. It created a strange hypodermic mosaic. At least they had caps on most of the time. There were usually a few shady kids hanging around, people she would run into on Haight Street and invite over, or those she would meet in the halls. She invited people over for many reasons, for company on occasion, once in awhile because they were down and out and dope sick and she had enough dope to share, but usually because she could get something out of them. On the particular day in question, she was recovering from a ketamine party that had raged throughout the prior evening. A friend had stolen a bottle of the stuff from a vet, and offered to get her high if she let him stay over. An easy enough bargain. He was still there, as were two other acquaintance, when Darby showed up at the door. Darby�s girlfriend had been in and out of the room for the past few days, and he was looking for her and a quick spot to fix at. Darby was well known in the junky community, mainly because he ripped everyone off, but also because he had HIV. As far as Delilah knew, nobody ever actually talked to Darby about his situation. There was a lot of fear and denial, and people mainly mentioned Darby�s situation in whispers behind his back. It�s not that they stayed away from him or looked down on him; they just didn�t seem to know how to talk about AIDS. On this particular occasion, when Delilah opened the door, it was obvious to her that he was dope sick. Tiny drops of sweat were beaded up on his brow, and his eyes were red and looked irritated.

"Hey Delilah. I, er, uh, need to find my girl.� He peered around her into the room, surveying the mess and the people tweaking in the room, not seeing his girl anywhere in the chaos. �Guess she ain�t here. Can I come in for just a sec?�

Delilah knew what that meant. Either he was gonna beg her for dope, or beg her to let him shoot his own stuff in her room. �Yeah, you might as well come in. Everything is already totally crazy in here.�

He sauntered in, greeted the other folks lurking in the room, and made himself as much at home as a transient junky ever can.

An hour later, everyone was fixing. Delilah, as usual, was having a desperate battle between her overwhelming desire to keep getting high and the resistance put up by her overworked veins. Darby had no problem hitting a vein, and had plenty of dope. He kept getting high, she kept struggling, and the party wound on like this throughout the night. His needles began to commingle with hers. She eventually noticed, was a bit disturbed, but was so fully enveloped by her own self-destruction that she either did not care or was just too obliterated to think.

�Darby�puh-lease be careful where you leave your rigs.� She said when she finally pulled herself away from what she was doing. �I just want to be safe,� she added, almost apologetically.

�No worries. I�m always careful about that.� Darby replied nonchalantly.

As soon as the plea was spoke, it was forgotten by Delilah in the frenzy of addiction and the unrelenting need to fill some ethereal inner void with drugs. Fates linked up; items piled together on the soiled furniture, and were exchanged along with the blood they contained. Darby�s HIV contaminated needle found its way into Delilah�s arm that fateful night.

Delilah�s narrative ends abruptly. Alec just stares on with an alien intensity and Delilah is now present, looking back at him confusedly.

�So, suicide was the only thing I could think of doing. Ever since I sobered up, in the back of my mind I knew that there was a chance that all the terrible things I have done with my life aren�t so forgivable. I guess the past haunts us sometimes. And, mine caught up. I don�t wanna live knowing that I am slowly dying.�

Alec looks down on the floor, contemplates the fliers on Delilah�s wall one by one, then his fingernail. She is hanging by a thread, absorbed by her drunkenness and the vividness of the stuffed memories she had invoked. Finally, Alec speaks.
�I think that, if we really think about it, we are in that situation every day. I know that I am slowly dying�perhaps it could come to me faster than I expect it. Remember that five year old girl who got hit by a bus last week on the corner? I�m sure she didn�t think about her mortality - she was just a happy innocent kid, but everyone who loved her expected her to have a full, blossoming life ahead of her. Then, it was over.�

Alec snapped his fingers to accentuate his point.
�Just like that.�

Delilah was kind of moved by all of that, enough to loosen her death grip on the SoCo bottle and to stop tipping it to and fro in an effort to ignore his words by focusing on the liquid�s hypnotic movement.

�It�s not fucking better to know that you are about to get hit by a bus. And, especially to know there is some foreign thing inside you that will eventually destroy you, and having to take tons of pills that may make you really sick just to ward off death, assuming you can afford treatment. Add to that being unable to have sex with any sane person, and your normal life is pretty much over. I don�t think you really have any clue what it is like to live with HIV.�

�Neither do you.� Alec retorted. �You are such a chickenshit that you won�t even try.�
His statement hits her hard, like the swing of an irate cop�s billyclub, straight to her lower abdomen.

He continued, �We know lots of people in recovery who have HIV. Even one transsexual. You used to tell me how much respect you had for them, and how inspiring it was that despite their problems, they kept on trying to live a beautiful life. I think you just want to take the easy way out.�

She sighed. Yes, it was true. She wanted to run away, to disappear like some grand sorceress. She wanted the pain and shame to swirl away down the bathtub drain. But either sick coincidence or something deeper wanted her to continue, to face the nightmare that continued to be her life.

�Who wouldn�t want to flee such a twisted situation? Come on now.� She said. �Addicts like us have survived all the torments life has thrown at us by escaping in our minds. Of course I�m going to keep trying to do that, one way or another.�

She had another, sudden and painfully violent, hiccup. It caused one of her arms to tense up and then swing to the left. Naturally, it was the arm with the SoCo bottle in it, which finally dove out of her arms and spread the last of its syrupy contents across her floor. �Fuck�I sure am drunk. Abstinence totally intensifies getting loaded. Hic-hic-hic-hiccup.�

�I�ve got an idea. Why don�t you get some sleep, sober up a little, and start tackling this manana?�

�What good will that do? I know I�ll still feel all fucked up inside, and have my first hangover in a year and a half to boot.�

�Yeah, you�ll feel shitty. But, you can ask for help, you can talk to your friends, and we�ll hit an NA meeting. There�s a whole community of people who care about you and will help you however they can.� He struggled to continue. �Look. I know I have been really wrapped up with my own bullshit lately. I�m sorry. Really. But, don�t think I won�t do whatever I can to help you deal with this. You�re one of the best friends I have. I don�t want to lose you. This disease doesn�t fucking mean I have to.�

�You really mean all that?�

�Yeah. I�ll even hold your hand.� He said sympathetically. �I�ve heard you hippies like
that sort of shit.� He added jokingly.

�Yeah, we kind of do. Fuck you and your hippy-prejudice anyway.�