I‘d like to share an excerpt from the essay It’s late, I can‘t breathe by Mario Wirz.
It’s late, I can‘t breathe is a stream of consciousness monologue of one night in which the author views his current situation: Berlin, 1991; he‘s thirty-five years old and HIV positive. He knows he’s going to die. The breathlessness of his despair propels him forwards as he looks back on how his life so far has unfolded. With each sentence, each thought he revolts against death.
„I dream against the omnipotence of the others. I correct world literature and transform Elizabeth Bennett to Ellison, whom Mr Darcy falls in love with. I re-write all pop songs and force the cute lead singer to sing hymns to beautiful men. I re-make all films one more time and give him and him a Happy End. „Explain the social conflict which kills Romeo and Juliet“, my English teacher tells me and smiles mockingly. I speak of Romeo and Juliet and think of Peter and David. I‘m seventeen years old and wait for my full legal age. Break out of the tea cake penitentiary and leave everything behind. The normality of the others is a hell. I‘m a stranger. I don‘t belong. Where do I belong? To my toilet-Romeos? Mostly inhibited, frightened men und unhappy husbands and fathers, who wank off their real selves quickly and in secret in some urinal. I‘m afraid of their unsteady eyes. I‘m afraid of the stench of their loneliness. I don‘t want to become like them. I‘m seventeen and count the days, scream poems onto paper and lead a double life. Peter in the cottage. Peter straying round the station. Peter with his trousers round his ankles. Tug and shake. Disgust and greed and a longing which blasts me to pieces. I have it off with strange men and in the evening I watch a Barbara Windsor movie with my mother. I write poems but I suffocate from my speechlessness. The sky over L. a lace doily. It‘s tight, I can‘t breathe, I can‘t think, I can‘t be. I have no words for what is happening inside of me. Even language belongs to the others. The garden gnomes are distributing the sentences which make me a foreigner. I can‘t join the conversation. I don‘t understand and I‘m not understood.“
From Es ist spät, ich kann nicht atmen, Mario Wirz, Aufbau Verlag
Translation by Nicola Caroli
There’s an English Version available: It’s late, I can’t breathe