I don’t know where to begin my story. See, I had this dream last night. A strangely enthralling dream it was although I would never want to be in it again.

I was perched on the edge of a stumpy chair towering over an army of red ants. It must have been the reigning lassitude that made me plant my foot in the army’s scent-trail, thinking that a giant’s sleepy foot could be just as harmless as a wall; but one soldier fought back. The sting was quick but perpetual, or so my dream told my brain to heighten the working of my sweat glands.

The other workers were blind but they seemed to have borrowed an impeccable 20-20 eyesight from a pretentious bum as they ran away from their end. The soldier faced me, meekly braced to the ebbing hold of gravity that abandoned another of its expendable champions. David and Goliath, in a dream where the small is anything but the victor. The crushing sound was not even close to the buzzing of a mosquito from a faraway planet but I could see that the red ant left a gaping hole in the face of my own universe.

Then I felt what my worthy enemy did to me. It gave me poison. A poison that could not kill a mosquito, not even the one from the faraway planet. A poison that did not show an X over a picture of some famous skull. It was not a snake’s spit. It took the form of saturated glucose and it flowed in my blood. I could taste the sweet in my empty mouth, smell a whiff of honey from an unseen beehive, and see the lines of red ants running haphazardly towards me. The red ants were real in my dream.

I was devoured alive but not completely, for I am telling you now.

Back in the real world, I sat, stirred and soaked in sweat. My left arm felt numb, my pillow gone. I could see the markings of my own head etched on the brown skin that ended in the black of space. “I had a dream,” I said before I thought.

I touched the ground with my bare feet, feeling the warmth that refused to leave with the drowning sun. While the cold wind brushed my nakedness, my feet, ah, they giggled. Left foot first to keep my balance, my left arm still asleep. I headed to the sink, opened the valve, and swallowed. I drank. I swallowed.

Four hours and twelve minutes past midnight. I puffed my last cig from a box that said “6mg tar, 0.5mg nicotine.” Looking out the window, I saw another hole in the universe, this time it was for me, placidly waiting in time, maybe longer than what the doctor had told me. But he told me ‘there is no cure.’ I am dying. Positive — HIV.

How did this ever happen to me? I ask myself everyday, and hear laughter, no, more like disdain. It was almost three years ago. I was walking in the street of what people might call the ‘subcity’ where the lights did not shine but rather cast a shadow on young girls. Girls in skimpy skirts and counterfeit pearl necklaces. They were too young to wear make-up but they did anyway even if it meant looking like a page in a child’s coloring book. Three girls stood beside the pavement and held each other’s hand. They had a look of fear in their eyes but they stayed bold.

I walked towards the three girls, anticipating a move from one of them. It wasn’t a move, just a slight invitation. “You wanna have fun?”

“Sorry, what was that,” I replied.

“You wanna get laid tonight?”

“Why would you think I wanna get laid tonight.”

“Well, first you’re here talking to us and second you look like you wanna get laid tonight,” she proudly added.

A smart prostitute, I thought. “I suggest you look again. I am here because I need to go to another place and this is the road that leads to that place. Also, I may look like I wanna get laid but I’d rather if it was clean sex than with you girls.

“Why do you do this kind of dirty job, anyway? Have you ever heard of AIDS?”

One girl obviously looked like she was going to jump on me and bite my head off. But she didn’t. She just went really close to my face and said, “Dirty, yes. But we only want to live. And if living means we have to do this kind of job, or get a disease, then we’ll take it.”

“This is not living. This is…”

“Your words are poison. We don’t want to hear it. If you don’t want to do it, then just go. Loser!”

I would have made the exchange of harsh words a little longer but I just let this one go. Who were the real losers anyway?

“Oh, I have AIDS. Would you still do it with me? I wish you could feel what I feel. It’s great,” the girl with the gruff countenance paused for a while realizing that she said something silly but she started to laugh and the other two joined in. They all laughed at me, with disdain. And I laughed back at them, only in my head.

Feeling defeated, I swore to the grave of whosoever that this memory would be forever buried in the tomb of dead cells, which I kept smothering with deeper puffs of smoke. Death I bestowed, and death to be reciprocated. But forgotten, yes, I lived without a trace of the memory until the day I met an artist with the sterilized needle.

Tattoos. The thing of the day. How about one? Sure, a clean needle is all there is to feel the pain, quick but not perpetual. Oh, how I was deceived to believe. The artist lied about the sterilized needle; the needle, although pristine as it looked, had touched the blood of a girl who was not the girl, but nevertheless shared the same venom in their blood. The sting of the needle lasted for eight hours and more. That day, that year, this lifetime and more.

There was no turning back. I wish I just walked past the three girls in the subcity. I wish the artist had not lied to me. I wish this had all been just a dream. A dream with no red ants. A dream and only a dream.

My tongue grazed the cracked surface of my lips and tasted the sweet of sugar that wasn’t there. The red ant had vanished but the hole in the universe loomed over me.

Important Note:
This is only fiction.