The Year I Became a Modern-Day Leper Along with My "Friend" Herpes

In the spring of 1990, at the age of twenty-four, I believed my life had already hit its floor. I was a recent college graduate, armed with a degree that felt worthless in the face of a crippling national recession. My pockets were empty, my prospects were bleak, and the long, bitter Canadian winter had only just surrendered, leaving behind a world as gray as my mood. To complete the portrait of youthful misery, I was reeling from the implosion of a toxic relationship with a woman whose love felt indistinguishable from possession. I was naive enough to think that things simply couldn't get any worse. Life, it seems, has a cruel sense of humor and was waiting patiently to prove me wrong.

My story, this particular chapter of it, begins with a different woman—a correspondence, really. For six intense months, my world had been illuminated by the letters of a woman who lived 1,200 miles away. She was a city dweller, impossibly beautiful, and radiated an energy that crackled through her prose. We were two young people in our twenties, slowly building a bridge of words across a vast distance, our friendship blossoming into a passionate, hopeful love. From afar, everything seemed perfect. But as I would learn, distance can be a powerful filter, smoothing over the jagged edges of reality.

The moment my university classes ended, I packed my life into a few bags and flew down to move in with her. The dream collapsed on impact. The woman I had constructed in my mind from paper and ink was not the person who stood before me. We were a portrait of contrast: a tall, Black artist with a crown of dreadlocks and a fair-skinned, statuesque princess. In the bedroom, our chemistry was undeniable, a fiery escape from the waking world. Outside of it, we were oil and water, two fundamentally different souls clashing in a small apartment. Peace was an impossibility; our cohabitation was a state of undeclared war.

I must carry my share of the blame. I was young, simmering with a directionless anger at the world for the hand it had dealt me, and I had a short fuse for the friction I felt from the woman I was supposed to love. I gave as good as I got, sowing discord with a bitter consistency. The magic of our letters evaporated in the harsh light of proximity. Our relationship, thankfully, was brief. When it ended, it left us both raw, disoriented, and bewildered at how something so promising from a distance could become so poisonous up close.

Just two days after our final, scorched-earth breakup, I vowed I would never see her again. Less than forty-eight hours later, fate, with its penchant for irony, had other plans. We were sitting side-by-side in the sterile, silent waiting area of a hospital clinic. Her eyes, when they met mine, were a storm of shame, fury, and a reluctant remorse. I couldn’t decipher my own feelings, let alone hers. I was a ghost adrift in a fluorescent-lit nightmare, trying to anchor myself to a reality that was slipping through my fingers.

You see, what had begun a few days prior as a minor, itchy irritation on my foreskin had erupted into something monstrous. A furious, swollen colony of tiny lesions was staging a coup on my body, bringing with it the full force of flu-like symptoms—aches, fever, a profound agony that consumed my every thought. This was a complete mystery, a terrifying invasion. In the panicked recesses of my mind, I prayed for anything but AIDS or Herpes. Given the choice, I would have desperately welcomed syphilis or gonorrhea—diseases that seemed, at the time, curable, temporary. A problem to be solved, not a life sentence.

Because the clinic doctors couldn't immediately identify my ailment, they insisted on testing us both. So there she was, my ex-lover of two days, tethered to me once more by this medical mystery. In one of the story’s more painful ironies, she had been honest with me from the start. Not long before we met, she had contracted Herpes from a casual partner who hadn’t informed her. She had assured me, with a certainty I now believe she truly felt, that as long as we avoided sex when she sensed an outbreak was coming, we would be fine. I was young, in love, and I believed her. The potential consequences were an abstract concept, a risk I was willing to take for the woman I thought I knew.

Sitting there in that waiting room, despite the animosity that crackled between us—a resentment I’m sure she harbors to this day—I remember feeling a wave of pity for her. I knew, somehow, that if it turned out she had given this to me, her devastation would mirror my own. We were trapped together in that moment, caught between hoping for the best and fearing the absolute worst.

The week that followed was a unique form of torture, waiting for the test results from the small sample they had taken from my lesions. When the call finally came, the news was euphoric. Negative. My test for herpes was negative. The doctors were still unsure what it was, theorizing it might have been a severe skin infection from rough sex. I was so flooded with relief I could barely breathe. I called her immediately to share the news, and for one fleeting, beautiful second, we were not enemies. We were two survivors who had just been handed a pardon. The test result, for better or worse, had saved us both.

Or so I thought. In reality, it was a temporary reprieve for only one of us.

Life moved on. I tried to put the whole disastrous episode behind me. Herpes, however, had not moved on from me. Two months later, another outbreak appeared. A month after that, another. Enraged and terrified, I stormed into a different medical facility, demanding answers. The doctors here were more experienced. They took one look at my penis and diagnosed me with herpes on the spot. They explained that in Canada at the time, there was no blood test available, only the swab test. They informed me that false negatives were common; for the test to work, the virus had to be actively shedding from the skin at the exact moment the sample was taken. If it wasn't, the result would be negative, even if the infection was already living inside the patient. My first test had been a fluke of timing. This time, the swab confirmed their visual diagnosis.

The doctors delivered the news with a chilling lack of compassion. There was no treatment they could offer, they said, and my sex life would be forever changed. My first instinct was to call my ex-lover and unleash a torrent of blame and rage. But I couldn't. In the wake of our breakup, she was actively trying to sabotage my career, spreading vicious rumors about how I had treated her. I lacked the courage to confront her, to add this truth to the battlefield of lies. And so, I never did. To this day, I will never tell her that she is the one who passed her inheritance on to me.

I cannot adequately express the depths of misery and humiliation that followed my diagnosis. In many ways, I felt my life was over. A sense of being unclean, of being permanently soiled, washed over me. The very word "herpes" sent a shiver down my spine. I was profoundly alone. The doctors offered no empathy. My close-knit, orthodox West Indian family was a sanctuary I could not enter with this secret. There was simply no one I could confide in. My mind became a theater for bizarre, fatalistic fantasies. The thought of having to disclose this to a future partner filled me with such dread that I considered a life of enforced celibacy.

I felt cursed, a character plucked from a biblical tale and punished for a crime I didn’t feel I had committed. I had behaved badly in my relationship, as many young men do, but surely not badly enough to warrant this divine retribution. This felt excessive, a punishment far outweighing the sin.

Once I accepted my new reality, the first thing I understood was that this was forever. I would never be a "whole" person again. I was "marked." I had become a member of a tribe of social outcasts. Like the lepers of a bygone era, I felt a moral imperative to hide my true self, to conceal the mark I carried. The feeling of being a victim was a cloak I despised, yet I couldn't seem to take it off. This was a weight I would have to bear for the rest of my life. I was officially one of them. But I had no idea what being one of them truly meant. It would take years, and many painful and liberating experiences, to find out.

Why am I telling you this story now? There is an element of narcissism, I admit. A natural human desire for one's narrative to exist, to be understood. But the primary driver is my own healing. It is an act of defiance. I will not be defeated by this virus, nor by society's cruel and irrational fear of people like me. I contracted herpes within a monogamous relationship; I was not being reckless. I am innocent of the moral failings so often associated with sexually transmitted infections.

The absolute worst place to be when you're dealing with herpes is in the closet, suffocating in shame. If you wish to live your life as a leper, to accept that treatment from others, that is your choice. But I will not. I have made the decision to break free from this condition rather than be defined by it. I am no longer embarrassed to say it out loud, to admit that I am one of "them." I have herpes, but herpes does not have me. I have finally made peace with the virus. And now, having found my own peace, I can help others find their way out of the shadows. The journey is far from over, but I have managed to transform the greatest negative of my life into one of my most profound sources of strength.