Ripple

I woke up yesterday after coughing all night to find my feed filled with National Coming Out Day posts and I found myself thinking about 1993. It was my first year at Hampshire College, and deep in the bad years of the AIDS epidemic, with people dying constantly. I was going back and forth from Western Mass. to NYC on the Peter Pan bus all the time for protests and memorial services, getting arrested and writing about it for class because you can do that at Hampshire. I was also organizing the AIDS Action Collective, a campus org that was dormant when I got there. We trained peer educators, lobbied for HIV testing on campus, got funding for an HIV resource center in the basement in one of the dorms. I was also organizing an annual international Youth Summit in my "free time." With all that going on, my life was a whirlwind, and I didn't really notice that this one girl kept showing up everywhere. She joined the AIDS Action Committee, rode the charter bus through the night to the Youth Summit in Durham, took statistics even though she was an art student. On National Out Day that year I had just gotten back from NYC, made my way back to campus from the bus stop in Amherst, and climbed the stairs to my room on the "Queer Hall". There was a note on my door, not just the usual scrawled messages from the pay phone in the hall -I often got unusual messages, like "Ann Northrop re: speech in Paris," - but this was different, written on forest green, crinkly paper in metallic paper in beatutiful script. After failing in her various attempts to get my attention, Kate S had asked my friend Collin, a few doors down the hall, what she should do. He told her to be direct. So she had written me this message, asking me to be her girlfriend. That began a connection that would last 23 years,until she left the planet in 2016, taking a jagged chunk of my soul with her to keep. I was never much of a Grateful Dead listener, could not have named any of their songs, but after Kate died, one song seemed to always be playing - in the supermarket, if I turned on Pandora, all over the place. "There is a road, no simple highway Between the dawn and the dark of night And if you go, no one may follow That path is for your steps alone Ripple in still water When there is no pebble tossed Nor wind to blow You who choose to lead must follow But if you fall you fall alone If you should stand then who's to guide you? If I knew the way I would take you home"