I don’t know how far away I am from the release from this body. I’m not being tricky using that word. “Death” doesn’t seem appropriate or applicable as it sounds like a bad thing. A thing you wish wouldn’t happen. A thing to be avoided if possible.

In my late 20’s, when I assumed I would die of AIDS at some point in my 30s, I used to have dreams that I would die a hero’s death. I would hear an anguished cry for help and rush headlong into the road to save a child who’d stumbled in front of a speeding car, or, impulsively dive into the freezing water under the brittle ice where some hapless kids had unwisely skated out too far onto a lake after dark. My muscles would propel me towards the thrilling resolution of the fateful accident, bypassing any concern for my own safety, to snatch from death this lucky kid who would surely grow up to be the next generation’s Shirley Chisholm or Henri Matisse. (I would be dead as a result of the rescue, but covered in glory, not Kaposi Sarcoma lesions.)

What a drama queen, no? And, could one’s life end any more romantically than that? Talk about turning lemons into lemonade.

To give freedom or free movement to something: release. That’s lovely, isn’t it? You picture thousands of doves gliding up into a blue sky on the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., or the sudden, desperate joy on the faces of two young female journalists as they are unwittingly ushered into an unknown room by their North Korean captors to find waiting a gleaming Bill Clinton.

My body is North Korea now, and I dream, daily, of escape. I fantasize about a bodiless state of being unanchored to the fucked-up vertebra in my back and neck. But in addition to captivity in my body, I’m also a prisoner of love. And so I also fantasize about being un-loved. I dream of a life where no one cares about me, especially whether I live or die. What if everyone who loves me were suddenly indifferent? Divorced from their affection for me. Bliss. Or if I suddenly stopped loving all the people on this little planet we sometimes pretend to ourselves we don’t see as the center of the universe. Sheer heaven.

Because with love come responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities. With divorce comes freedom. Loneliness perhaps, and freedom.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and feeling about the people with whom I am in love. Ann Marie and Marge and Chelle and Kerin and Sherry and Moira and Ellen and Patrice and Marlene and Debbie and Laura and Carol and Susan and Janice and Kay and Mona and Melissa and Amanda and Bibi and that’s only a partial list of the women.

I say in love because they love me back as passionately and completely as I love them, not because of any sexual dimension to the relationship (god forbid). Meryl didn’t make the list because I love her more than she loves me.

There are two men though that I do have to list. They are, when push comes to proverbial shove, the actual reasons I am still here. They are both in their twenties and they have both begun to feel to me like what I imagine sons would feel like. I’m proud of who they are in a way that really takes me by surprise, since I had nothing whatever to do with shaping who they are. Their names are Bill and Brendan and they’re both made of a fiber that impresses and humbles me. They seem to me to grow every day with their struggle to understand what it means to be an artist, a partner to the woman that each of them loves, and a citizen of the world.

I see myself so clearly in both of them, and I’m flattering myself in saying that. The world they live in as the young men that they are is so much more predatory than the one I remember from my twenties. They are so much more aware than I was at that age, and what they may face in the years to come makes me want to punch in the nose anyone who may interfere with their future happiness.

Bill was originally a student of mine, is now my friend, and is about to begin the process of raising money so that he can produce a play that I have written, which he wants me to direct, and in which he wants to play one of six very challenging roles. I am trying to talk him out of it. Brendan found me through a close mutual friend and has begun making a documentary film about me and my (in his word: rational) relationship to my own death, which fascinates him, and which, by his own admission, he now hopes will not take place anywhere in the near future.

When I think about causing pain to either of them I feel a terrible despair. I have been absolutely honest with them both about the precariousness of my relationship with my enemy—my body, and I do not want them to be burdened by having loved me when I’m gone.

I also want my pain-free body back. And I know that both are impossible.

When I push them about their emotional stake in these projects (and I have, quite hard), they insist they are not trying to keep me alive, but that it’s just a good fringe benefit of a more selfish desire on their own parts. I believe they believe they are telling me the truth. And I suppose they are, finally. But unlike a parent who throws himself in front of a speeding car, or dives into icy water to save his son from harm, I have the oddest and most acute awareness of being not just the parent, but also the harm. I look forward to my body becoming ash.

It’s strange to feel that way about my own body now. The problem is I don’t feel quite that way about my life. But we only get the one vessel. And the way that the one impacts the other is cruel. My life has become about dealing with the dysfunction of my body. Certainly not an original story. But I still don’t know if I’m a heroic enough character to press forward in spite of the pain. When I say “stay tuned” I’m talking as much to myself as I am to you.