I have been writing in a journal on an almost-daily basis since I was 17 years old. This is a record of me going through each entry from the beginning, and commenting on the me from fifteen years ago.

Something too crazy that I thought would never affect my life just hit home for me tonight. A small and tiny incident that I always imagined I would never come to know now has implications in my life that could, if they all came true, ruin most of what I consider me. I just can’t accept that any of it would come true. Not the slightest hint of it any farther than what is already true. Why, I don’t know. Maybe because I lead a charmed life. Maybe because I’m the hand of God. Maybe because my fantasies of outlandish occurances never happen. Maybe just because I don’t want it to. I don’t want any of it to be true like I’ve never wanted anything before in my life. For the first time I can remember in a long time, Maybe for the first time, I find myself saying, if there is a God, if you do exist, none of this will happen. So now I find out if there is a God.

What happened was that a friend of mine found out that someone she had sex with was diagnosed with AIDS. That meant that not only could she have AIDS, but through connection, so could a lot of my friends and me. In the end, she did not have the disease, but there was a solid week while awaiting the test results where we were all facing our mortality. Not one of the funner times in college.