My First Year With My " Mate " Herpes Or How I Was Re-Born A Modern Leper.

It was 1990, I was twenty-four years of age and I did not think my life could become any worse. Magazine. A long gloomy winter had just given up the spook and to top it all off I was in the middle of a terrifying break up with a vengeful girlfriend. We had courted terribly romantically by letter and telephone for half a year before ever getting together. We started as buddies and the love between us grew slowly with all of the hopefulness and keenness predicted with us both being in our twenties. Unfortunately, what was so amazing by distance was a nightmare close up. When my classes finished and I flew down to move in with her it took little time for things to go very wrong. We had just immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago. But none of this touched us- we were living a different life.

Not the love you see on the T. V. and in the movies- a larger love, a deeper love. They told me there was nothing they could do for me and I would have this illness for life and that my sex life would never be the same. I could not debate this with any person in my conservative West-Indian family even though we were otherwise close.