Time Is What Keeps the Light from Reaching Us
by Aaron Carico

I fill this room with the echo of many voices. The sun comes and floods this empty room, I call it my room.

I listen to your voice, David. Onscreen, you’re wearing a Ronald Reagan mask made of latex, like the ones from Point Break, and you’re looking at photos of Mark Morrisroe, one of him splayed on a bed, hard cock against his thigh, a twink pinup. “Mortality no longer feels like some abstraction I can push away to the age of eighty or ninety or whatever. There’s no longer a luxury of pushing the idea of mortality away.” You’re walking around Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. It’s fall 1989. Morrisroe died that July. You unfasten the mask, take it off, and you read the scrim of text that covers your own photos of Peter Hujar’s corpse. Your words shield your lover’s dead body. Peter had died almost exactly two years before. Your voice is propulsive, a juggernaut. It vibrates with fury.

“‘If you wanna stop AIDS, shoot the queers,’ says the governor of Texas on the radio. And his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking, and didn’t know the microphone was turned on. And besides, he didn’t think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways. And I wake up every morning, I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America, and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg… And I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media, or on people’s lips, the religious types outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, shouting to the men and the women in the gay parade: ‘You won’t be here next
year! You’ll get AIDS and die! Ha ha!’”

Before La pudeur et l’impudeur, Hervé, the home video you made while you were sick, a death notice flashes up. Hervé GUIBERT est mort le 27 décembre 1991. Your video’s full of all the little details of your life—eating a soft-boiled egg, talking on the phone, getting a massage, seeing doctors, taking a shit, riding an exercise bike. I say to myself, these are some things I do. An hour later, at its end, you’re sitting at your desk, behind a typewriter and a stack of notebooks and the long white arm of an articulated desk lamp. Disembodied, your voice narrates the scene. “One needs to experience something at least once before one can film it. Otherwise,
these things won’t be understood… Video brings you to another time. A new time.” Your brow’s furrowed, your mouth moves, you’re writing or transcribing something, and you seem to speak the words, or to bite your lips, or to cry above the page, in a little patch of incandescent light. There’s an indistinct painting behind you of a man slumping along a wall that reminds me of Marat’s assassination. Then you stand up from the desk, and walk out of the room, out of the frame. I watch you, Hervé, and then I watch you again, and then again, and again. You move forward and backward, but your track and destination never change.

It’s Monday morning in my bedroom, and a warm yellow light spills through the open window onto the sill, and across the empty blue pots, and through the leaves of a tree. It’s the same light that fell into your rooms, the same angle, the same tone. Somewhere out there are objects you all touched, a mug in someone’s apartment, a chair where you sat. Monday morning, and I lie in bed, trying to balance on a beam before falling into thinking, into myself, into my day. In my room, halfway between dreaming and waking, I enter something like a prayer, open, waiting, asking, one of you, any of you—for what? Nothing comes. All I have are a few films, these transmissions, where you live to die again.

There’s this shimmering wobbly mirage, a hologram, in each of them. I sit here sketching its contours.

In Egypt, the dead body was adorned with its own likeness. The face of the corpse was covered with stucco and painted, so that its spirit wouldn’t be lost in the afterlife. At Fayum, the living would pose for a workaday painter who sketched each of their faces in encaustic on wooden panels. In these portraits, small and intense, John Berger writes that “the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.” On one of these panels, of Eutyches, freedman of Kasanios, there’s an inscription around the neckline of his tunic that reads, “I confirmed,” a signature authenticating his likeness: Yes, this is me. These portraits were pinned over their cloth-covered faces before burial, and their eyes, on a museum wall, burn from somewhere outside time. In Rome, patrician families kept large sets of masks of their ancestors that were made of wax and stored in atrium cabinets and shown to guests, as a sign of status and filial piety. Over time, through repeated use, the masks became pitted, discolored, and degraded. In funeral processions actors wore these masks, called imago, so that everyone, living and dead, was present in an unbroken line.

In my new city, the dead keep me company. A strong dry wind blows across the surface of my life.

Out on the heath cruising boys, there’s one standing in a tree in December, naked and frozen in moonlight, as if made of marble. You write of sleepless nights, Derek, of night sweats, fevers, of lost sight, rashes, losing half a stone, of being shipwrecked in a hospital bed, another one dead, the vicar making rounds. The nameless young man, frail as Belsen, shuffling outside in the hall. Distant coughing down the quiet corridor. When I finish your book I put on Blue, and your images come inside me like dreams.

I feel lust and grief. I feel envy, that black milk. Sitting in bed, lonely in the city, in comes the Angel of Death, a messenger stepping over the void. It’s dusk, there’s a soft breeze, the breeze smells a bit like blossoms, and I hear the bees of infinity. Dead souls, they whisper. The void is filled with your faces. You’re all down in a crater, buried alive, and my cheeks are wet. Watching you, reading you, distance collapses between my time and yours, between my life and yours, my life and your deaths— what is it you want from me? what is it I want from you? I had my first crush on a boy when I was 12. It was 1990. I search “1990 AIDS deaths”: “100,777 deaths among persons with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome were reported to CDC by local, state, and territorial health departments” between 1981 and 1990, and “almost one third of these deaths were reported during 1990.” Rust-red carpet, the tv on, the evening news, my dad sitting in an armchair, the wingback where my mom usually sat. I was sitting on the living room floor, he was wearing his green twill work uniform, and he was talking back to the tv.

They’re not “gays.” They’re homosexuals, he said, and I turned and saw the quilt on the Mall, a protest.

On tv I saw them demanding to be recognized, fighting to live without shame or threat of harm. I was growing up in a little mountain county, rural and remote and poor, where they dug coal out of the ground. My family had never not lived there. Not a single strand of relation connected me to the world that these faraway lovers and warriors inhabited—not to their cities or to any city. Like a planet seen through a telescope, that world existed only in the most abstract way. (“People know that things are different elsewhere,” Didier Eribon writes of his own queer working-class childhood, “but that elsewhere seems part of a far off and inaccessible universe.”) No strand connected me, but when I risked sharing my desire in the place I was raised, risked speaking it, making it real, known—not just a thing in my own head but a fact in the world—I owed something to that history. The history they had made was the backdrop for my own desire somehow, for the possible shapes I was aware it could take. That collective movement I glimpsed on tv was hewing out the niche, through struggle and sacrifice, love and anger, where I could fit myself and my desires. Thanks to them, I would be able to name myself. Where I was born—into the wrong place, into the wrong family—there was nowhere for me to be or to become, and these strangers made that place. As I grew up, they were being abandoned by the ones in power, ignored, left to die.

I came out at 17 to a friend I wanted to kiss. It was September, and we’d driven into the mountains, to a lake where my family used to camp when I was a kid. We parked in an empty gravel lot covered with yellow poplar leaves. I was wearing my dad’s denim work jacket with its corduroy collar. Our feet wading through the leaves, and the sound of me saying I wanted him. It was 1995: Derek Jarman had died the year before, though I didn’t know it then. Two years before that David Wojnarowicz died. The year before that Hervé Guibert died. And Mark Massi died, and the year before that his partner Tom Joslin died.

In the first few pages of Paul Monette’s book, Borrowed Time, he recalls the initial reports. He puts down in his diary in December 1981 some gossip about a “gay cancer,” and then there’s a story in an LA gay newspaper a few months later. By the time he’s finishing the book in 1988, so many of his friends have died, including his boyfriend Roger, that he opens Borrowed Time saying, “I don’t know if I will live to finish this.” Monette remembers a health scare he and Roger experienced early on, just as news of the disease was first circulating, recounting the unexplained symptoms Roger suffered. Already for them, in 1982, in LA, there was some fear that sex might be making them sick, though he and Roger were never part of the “High Eros” scene at the bathhouses or on Fire Island, the world of “so many men, so little time,” and for a while they believed that insulated them from whatever was unfolding.

“So many monsters have haunted the darkness of AIDS,” he writes. Even if just four thousand had died by March 1985, “already we all knew stories of men left incoherent in their own excrement, abandoned overnight by friends, shipped back to a fundamentalist family to pay the wages of sin. They were chained to their beds with dementia in New York. They lost their houses and all their insurance.” Reading Monette’s memories is like recalling a forgotten dream, a nightmare, none of its events or details very clear, just some vague anxiousness, the sense that something’s off, which sometimes lasts into the afternoon.

What did I know then, at age 17, about AIDS? Almost nothing. Stories on the nightly news, my mom and her friend gossiping about Rock Hudson, jokes in school. In college, one of the first boys I had sex with didn’t want, at first, to have any physical contact because it was too risky—he might die. Not long after graduating college, in the first few months of dating my first boyfriend, he called me, panicked, sobbing. His closest friend had contracted HIV. This friend spiraled, became addicted to meth, went in and out of rehab, and eventually committed suicide. Later in graduate school, one of my friends phoned me, and his words in my ear were alien. “I’m paws, I seroconverted.” Someone had slipped off the condom while fucking him, that was his best guess, and he spent the next six months in bed. Later, he quit his fancy job, bought a motorcycle (my hands are around his waist, we’re riding through San Francisco), and at parties he began breeding boys who chased the virus. And then he disappeared. Every year or two I google his name and find no trace that he exists.

For me, for my generation who came of age in the mid ‘90s, death was etched into sex. When protease inhibitors came onto the market and turned the tide in 1996, that was a victory won by those lover and warriors. But even after that, AIDS was still there, always more or less distant in the background, the static behind the signal of my own sexual desires, of any sexual desire then. AIDS—but not its history, or its legion dead. The first documentary footage I’d ever seen of someone suffering through AIDS was the record of your illness, Tom, which I watched when I was 23, in a classroom filled with desks made of melamine and metal, lined with
blackboards, on a pull-down projector screen. Even though it was made only a decade before I saw it, Silverlake Life arrived for me like a dead sea scroll from a lost era. A videographer, you and your partner of twenty years, Mark Massi, both have AIDS, and you, Tom Joslin, decide to video your illness. The film opens with a shot of your face, smiling, juxtaposed with a shot into a canister filled with ashes. There’s the arc.

Early in the documentary, you video your trip into the hardware store, walking to the back, where you try to separate a plastic trash can from a nested stack, and you can’t. You have to go back to the car to rest. You say you’re winded now, you need a nap. You are small, slight. You lose weight. You and Mark take a vacation, maybe to Palm Springs. Mark swims in the pool, KS polka-dots his back. The proprietor asks him to put his shirt on. Then he flashes his lesions to your camera—a political act, Mark says.

There’s a clip from one of your earlier films, where you interview your father, all bravado, who can’t stand that his son’s a faggot, and he spits onto the ground, ashamed. You interview your mother Mary, a New England matriarch amid her sitting room furniture, and ask if she recalls when you came out to her. She says, “Yes, it was in the lobby of the New England Center at the University of New Hampshire. And I was standing at the time on an orange rug, and I very shortly sat down.” Mark calls her a typical liberal and says, “she feels sort of sorry for us in her own little way, that, you know, we can’t live like the rest of the world. And those sort of things just, I mean, when you build them up on a larger scale that’s what makes homosexuals commit suicide.” Cut to Mark sitting on the eaves of a roof, an antenna behind him, reading from a book about gay revolution. “It will not be until what straights call blatant behavior is accepted with respect that we are, in any sense, any of us free.”

You lose more weight. You’re starting to look wizened. You film Mark dancing by himself in your all’s house, and he’s taking a lot of pleasure in the moves. You and Mark go to the botanic gardens. It’s so sunny, you wear a tam and a robe. You use a walker. You’re 43, 44—my age. You all joke with each other. You’re lighthearted. You flirt. You’re still in love. You narrate your slow walk like a horse race—can you make it past the next bench without having to sit down? You lose more weight. You sleep a lot, days sometimes. From your bed, you say you regret not doing more, not having accomplished more. I hear you speaking as an artist. Friends begin to visit. They’re saying goodbye without saying goodbye. Mark starts to do more of the filming. A KS lesion grows on your right eyelid. Mark says it hurts you and then he reaches out to lift it, the camera lens peering in close, and underneath the lid, a dark gelatinous black, a void where your eye used to be.

“AIDS is progressive, a disease of time,” Susan Sontag writes, and as the shadow of death lengthens, the sick body, prematurely aged, transforms into a ruin that’s also a monument. As a monument it records the violence of the state’s abandonment, and as a ruin, the disintegration caused by that abandonment.

Your body, Tom, becomes a medium of time’s work, time-lapsed. The bones of your skull begin to show through, like rocks under eroding soil. Two-thirds of the way through the film, there’s a cut between shots, and then Tom is dead! Mark’s crying—his face fills the frame—the camera turns to you, to the body the body the body. The undertaker comes and throws back the sheet. The body is naked. The undertaker’s meaty hands. Rolling the body, the corpse, into place. The place is the center of a white vinyl bag. The undertaker moves the body like a marionette with cut strings. The body moves like a bunch of sticks shoved into some knee socks. The body moves like a piece of the pile bulldozed into a ravine in Night and Fog. Lifeless, okay, yes, this person I was watching is no longer a person. The head lolls. Mark complains that your eyes won’t close with the sweep of a hand like they do in movies; they keep popping open. Were they open when you died? This face I’ve been gazing at for weeks, months, a year, an hour: a zipper and it’s disappeared. The undertaker wraps the excess vinyl — again and again—there’s so much material, your body’s so shrunken — until it’s swaddling-tight. Meatyhands lifts the sack, without ceremony. Meatyhands takes it outside, and slides it into the back of a van like an
old rug.

***

Something goes out of you, leaves you, when you topple over into the kingdom of the ill. Each day is like a chair that you’ve sat in a thousand times, you don’t even think of the chair, you just sit in it, oblivious, with a faith so total it’s unknown. And then once, twice, three times, the chair collapses under your weight. Each morning when you’re ill is like standing in front of the chair, there isn’t any other chair, and you can’t not try to take your seat. Your sense of the world’s coordinates shifts, your relation to hours and days and what’s possible for you warps, your timeline breaks.

A decade ago, in Berlin for the summer—newly single, and there for the drugs, the dancing, the sex—I noticed in the shower one morning a tiny red lump in the middle of my chest. So minor, but weeks passed, and it wouldn’t go away. By then, a pinkish welt had spread over half my chest. I went to a lake to swim and felt ashamed when I took off my shirt. I crept into the water. I got out and lay on my towel and crumpled my shirt into a wad and placed it on the swollen lump. When I finally went to a doctor back in the Midwest, he laid me down on the table, painted my skin red with iodine, and drew a blade across the lump. When I left there was a bin half full of gauze soaked with pus and blood and an inch-deep crater below my sternum. A few mornings later, the bandage still on my chest, I lifted my arms in front of the bathroom mirror—underneath, they felt weird, so sore—and I found a dozen more red welts. That week, ulcers began to form on my shins and calves. When I put antibiotic ointment on them, they got bigger. I disinfected them, bandaged them, treated them with tea tree oil, and they grew. New ones appeared. Then all over my scrotum small open sores appeared. I limped when I walked. My lungs began to feel tight. When I breathed deeply, there were tiny stabbing sensations inside me. One morning, standing naked in front of the mirror, I saw a wide band of miniscule red dots wrapping around my entire torso that had appeared in the night.

I went to urgent care, I went to the emergency room, I went to dermatologists and naturopaths and therapists. I was tested for MRSA, I was put in an MRI. “You’re a conundrum,” a doctor told me after my third visit in a week. I’d never been so scared, no one knew what was going on, everyone was spitballing, and I realized—which I’d never even considered before, never even thought possible—that I’d reached a frontier of medical knowledge. At the ER, because of all my unrelated symptoms, and because I was gay, the attending physician wondered aloud if I might have advanced HIV. Another doctor, reading the results of a bacterial culture from an ulcer on my leg, told me that I’d somehow managed to contract a rare tropical disease, whose name I’d never heard before. He couldn’t imagine how I’d gotten it, but then again I did have sex with men— and when I understood what was happening, I told him to fuck off. A dermatologist finally looked at me and said I had an autoimmune disorder. He told me there was no cure for it, just a bad prognosis, and likely a disfiguring surgery later on.

In that wilderness that surrounds the kingdom of the ill, you’re as abandoned as any outlaw, banished from the world of order. To be a fag who’s fucking and falling mysteriously sick, who’s diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, with no good outlook, and little diagnostic clarity—to be shoved over into that lawless territory, hard against the boundary of medical knowledge—was to find myself in a kind of historical après-coup. The mirage of a past I hadn’t actually lived through suddenly enfolded me, like some sort of hysterical hallucination.

Writing about fairy tales, Bruno Bettelheim said those stories give ambiguous expression to feelings that are too overwhelming for a child to confront head on. The child’s lack of awareness about their feelings is what makes the tale powerful and enchanting. If he were told directly about his killing hatred for his parents or his erotic pleasures in make-believe, he would be robbed of the tales’ uses and pleasures. Conscious recognition occludes vicarious satisfaction. Through repeated hearings, the child stocks the tale with his own personal meanings—his deeply hidden feelings, his utter hopelessness, powerlessness—and the problems that oppress him get some alleviation.

By the time I had a handle on my illness, I’d moved to New York, and lust and appetite began to make up for feeling frail and fragile. For a while, as one of the devotees of “High Eros” that Monette describes, each new body was a life-giving revelation. I was trying to come to terms with what I’d just gone through when, through a séance with your works—David, Hervé, Derek, Tom—I conjured your ghosts.

After reading Modern Nature, Derek, I watched your films. Beautiful boys around the stelae at Avebury holding mirrors as Marianne Faithfull sings. A winter feast where the diners light their Amaretti papers after the meal, and the papers float above the table like little sky lanterns made of fire. The first sound of Blue, your last film, is a mallet striking a singing bowl. A man says, “From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image.” A man says, “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.” The entire film is a shot of International Klein Blue. Irradiant and transfixing, this blue rectangle hangs in the dark. In a world of image, a
pandemonium of image, here there is no image—it’s your farewell to color because it’s your farewell to sight. I see only this glowing and luminous field of ultramarine. Infinite, impassable. The outlandish visuals of your earlier films—an iron cage topped by a manic hopping urchin, a bed with two naked boys in ocean surf circled by inquisitors, a shirtless young Caravaggio wielding a knife against a fat john he’s just fucked—all are erased from the screen, wiped clean, leaving only an empty sky. I listen to voices, melodies, ambient chatter, images displaced onto the film’s soundscape.

One man’s voice speaks to me from a café—the clatter of chairs being pulled, the din of conversation, street sounds floating in. St. Bartholomew’s now, a hospital like St. Vincent’s in New York, that became a queer charnel house, a colony of lepers dying in exile. The clamor of intercoms, muffled directives, gurney wheels. An oboe plays—how to describe that sound? An empty landscape made of wind. Here’s a desert caravan, and Marco Polo sitting on a throne of lapis flecked with gold. Given no images, my mind invents them. An ideal film, an imaginary film. I don’t project myself into it, it projects itself into me. It lives in me. It dreams in me.
Distance collapses. I lie in bed, I turn my head as the needle goes into my arm, I’m hooked to the stinging drip. The doctor’s penlight shines in my eyes, a shadow eats at the corners of my field of vision, my retina’s detaching and there are black floaters like a cloud of starlings. A skyblue afterimage appears when the doctor’s penlight clicks off. A blue void. In order to be given sight, I’m given blindness.

Walter Benjamin said once that we look to the past so that we can learn how to live. It’s where we find our heroes. You dead, famous or nameless, are my contemporaries. You are my contemporaries because I inhabit the same terrain you did. “What are you supposed to do with the dead?” my friend Max Fox asks. As queers who still live “in the social form which our predecessors helped forge against the terrifying power of the modern capitalist state,” Max says, “their concerns are still our concerns, as are the meanings of their deaths.” Staring at his father’s corpse, John Berger writes that he wants to draw, directly, objectively, this familiar body that he won’t ever see again. The drawing will be a record of its own making, which is the experience of his looking into his father’s coffin. This confers a density to the image. It preserves a moment of relation, of attention, another view of time. No longer “a site of departure,” Berger’s drawing of his father “has become a site of arrival,” he writes. “Every day more of my father’s life returns to the drawing in front of me.” At some point, the drawing is finished, the process ends, like life. But unlike life, there remain the marks made on the page, which are magical.

Watching these movies, these home videos, I’m put into the position of a spectator. It’s my only available relation to this past—at least in the sense that the past is irrecoverable. It’s marked by an absolute otherness. You’re dead and gone. A gap divides us, and there’s no closing it, no bridging it. My relationship to your work, to you is ambivalent. When I was sick and sitting on those exam room tables, my illness wasn’t social, or political, it just isolated me. It wasn’t any threshold to community. It was meaningless, and I was alone. I can’t say whether that aloneness separates me from you or connects me to you. Most of you suffered and died alone. A death sentence didn’t equal radical belonging; but your political formations did. My friends and I are out in the streets sometimes, shouting, thousands of us crackling with some collective current, but the unity and the ecstasy dissipate, and nothing seems to have remained and nothing seems to have changed.

From the vault of the past, your faces reach toward me. I can’t revive you or contact you. I watch, and I write. I sit at my desk, combing through these scraps of images and words that have been left behind, combing through the ashes of a house, seeing what was lost in the fire.

At my desk for twenty years has been a found photo, a black-and-white snapshot, of an anonymous boy with his back against a tree trunk, he’s maybe 11 or 12, and his hands cup a mask that’s carved with some inscrutable expression. It perfectly covers his face. What this boy wanted had been set under the seal of endless damnation by the people who raised him and by the whole place he was raised. They were country people, workers, miners, dirt farmers, and they were bent on snuffing him out. Behind the mask, he dreams of other kin.

Monday, 17 June 1991. There’s another visitor walking through the garden, and a letter from a student in Oxford that demands a reply: ‘Dear Derek, I love you madly, I wish you were my father.’

With me in each of those doctors’ offices and exam rooms for the month that I was almost constantly in and out of them, I carried Virginia Woolf’s diaries. I read her writing about illness, about non-being, the stretches of tedium and boredom, of drudgery, when everything is reduced to a dull metallic flatness, a sameness, that she calls the cotton wool of life. And behind this cotton wool, she writes, “is hidden a pattern.” A great unity, which is not God, but that nonetheless connects us, connects everything, in a unifying totality. This “is the truth about this vast mass we call the world,” she says. In these moments of being, we are relieved of separation. “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” We contact the real, that which can’t be faced because it’s too bright, like the sun, and real for that very reason.

I’m trying meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive, to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs—like you did in your works, your death masks. Right now, I am putting my hand over my eyes, and it’s like I’m standing outside and a cloud has passed over the sun—there’s that particular darkness of cloud-shadow, where everything dims but an encompassing light filters in from the far borders. I’m thinking of the migrant laborers at lapis mines in the Nile Valley, who had traveled hundreds and thousands of miles for a long stint of work in the desert. The site was remote. Outside the mine’s mouth stood tall plinths of rock, and the workers would carve messages into the stone, a kind of graffiti addressed to the laborers who’d come after them. We were here. With these workers lies the origin of the alphabet, the material history of these shapes on the page called writing, which is the record of a belated meeting with those who came before and those who’ll come after. When I lift my hand, I’m here at my desk, in lamplight, staring again at the page.

Is this a letter, is that what I’m writing? a letter to all of you? to each of you? like Jack Spicer did to Lorca— “that is how we dead men write to each other,” Spicer said. You’re far away, there’s no address, I might as well be scribbling this in the air. Earlier, over dinner, I stared westward, where planes cross, every minute there’s another one at the same angle, headed somewhere else, and I thought about how space had been mastered in ways unimaginable to people a few centuries ago, and wondered whether one day time would be mastered too. Incommensurable, our two moments touch, there’s overlap, and some occult communication passes to me through your work. I wonder if my words will ever reach you.

Did you know that at the end of Hail the New Puritan there’s a beautiful moment where beautiful Michael Clark is performing on stage, dancing, leading the crowd in synced moves, until one by one the crowd falls to the floor, some writhing, some playing dead, and they’re all just lying there in the club, on the floor, while the beat keeps going? And then Clark steps off the stage, and he reaches an arm down. One by one, the members of the crowd are helped back up to their feet, they help each other up, and they go on dancing as Clark exits.

Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud, will run like sparks through the stubble, you said. Here, on the white paper where I’m writing you, the sun hits the graphite from my pencil at just the angle to make the particles glitter. After you left, I taped three notes to the wall in my room: Death comes soon. No more hiding. Use your time.

Aaron Carico lives in Brooklyn.

Image: David Wojnarowicz, “Untitled (Burning House)” (1982)

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