By Jim Nelson

Nothing felt right when I opened the door to our apartment that evening. The lights had been turned down, and the steady current of contentment that ran daily through the place seemed muted by some invisible dimmer. I could see my boyfriend, the man I’d been living with for six months, lying gravely on the couch, his body splayed out, hands folded over his stomach in a funereal pose. Candles flickered everywhere, wicking away at some truth in the air. Ever since, I haven’t trusted candles. They’re always masking something.

He stirred and slowly crouched forward, looking pained and unnatural, like a mannequin trying to sit. He babbled something about how lucky he was to have me, and then began to confess:

Honey, I’ve been lying to you.

I’m sorry, but contrary to what I told you, I’m . . . I’m . . .

I lied. I’m . . . I’m . . . H.I.V.-positive.

There was an instant muffle of all sound and senses, an audible snuff to the candles. Everything halted, hung in the air awaiting further clarity. I had the disoriented but absolute conviction that I was getting the story line terribly wrong.

We’d already had the Conversation, because you had to, back then in the ’90s; pretty much every gay couple did. You had it early, before you got serious or hurt or infected or whatever it was that was coming to you.

“Have you been tested?” I asked before we slept together the first time. He didn’t hesitate. “Yep, negative,” he said, with a small commiserating smile, as if we’d both escaped the zombie apocalypse.

Now he was trying to explain months of misdirection: I’m so sorry. I just didn’t want to lose you.

The psychic disruption jarred and jabbed so quickly that it could not settle into a single coherent feeling, and yet each had its turn: a flash of anger, a grip of fear, a surge of anxiety, some compassion that couldn’t quite take hold.

We argued, we failed to find sense and soon I was out on the streets, with no mission but to get as far away from that apartment as I could. I was new to the city, had few friends here and hardly knew my way around. I couldn’t call my parents back home, because they wouldn’t understand, not yet. How could I tell them that my first serious gay relationship had ended in tears and viruses?

So I walked in a dull stupor. I made my way from our apartment on 17th and Irving Place down to Union Square, where the park was alive with purpose. Skateboarders, drunks, a man yelling about the tyranny of skateboarders and drunks. I sat on a bony green bench as the last light faded away and let the shock run through me.

I stopped at a pay phone on the north side and called my best friend in California. He told me not to panic or spend time rushing to my worst fears. He asked me what I was planning on doing for the night, and I said I couldn’t say. Did I have money for a hotel? I did not.

I headed down University to Washington Square, sticking at first to the public comfort of parks. Running through my head was every mistake I’d made — moving in too soon, moving in too soon — and any sign I might have missed.

We’d met in a phantasmagoric gay nightclub that looked like an abandoned airport terminal whose departure gates were blacked out and could never be found in the haze, and whose poorly lit hallways led continuously, magically, to more bars. As soon as I saw him, there in the back bar behind the other back bar, the handsomest guy in the darkest club I’d ever been in, I knew I had to push myself to say, Hey.

Soon I was spending every night with him, hanging out with new friends, introducing him to my parents, a first. When we found a small apartment and moved in together, I couldn’t believe how quickly the web of a full New York life was taking hold. I hadn’t even known that this was what I wanted, coming home to the same man every night, cooking dinner together like suburbanites, until I realized that it was nothing more complicated than happiness. So I gave in to it, another first.

Walking became a kind of somatic therapy that night. It was the grid of New York that kept me going. I wanted to feel it under my feet. To know it. If you are lost, wandering, there is something fixed and unyielding about the layout of New York streets that is comforting, that does not require you to have bearings. You can walk it and learn it, learn to know it, as you go. The city doesn’t let you feel aimless.

I walked every inch of what I thought of as Greenwich Village — not the West or East Village, Greenwich: across 13th to Seventh, back around 12th to University, then to 11th, back and forth, east to west, again and again, as I moved south, sticking close to the grid, like a lab rat hugging the sides of his maze. It was an accidental tour of the mind: By walking past, however numbly, the monumental houses I’d always loved on the north side of Washington Square (who could live there except millionaire poets?), or stalking the block of West 10th between Fifth and Sixth, a perfect block if there ever was one (I’d lived there briefly when I moved here, sleeping on a generous friend’s futon), I was letting my distracted mind pass through parts of the New York I still wanted to brush up against. And I was testing the city. There was a moment — actually, it was hours — when I convinced myself: This is it. New York is over for me. I tried it. It didn’t work. But that idea — giving up, starting over — didn’t feel right either.

I walked most of that night, staying up into the wee hours, tracing and retracing my steps, stopping once at the French Roast cafe on 11th Street at 2 or 3 a.m. and watching the foot traffic move up Sixth Avenue. I remember people staring in through the glass, surprised to find another person still awake to their misery or lost in the consolation of a bottomless cup.

I knew by then I’d go back. I’d sleep on the couch, the same damned couch where this long night had started. And I’d figure out where I’d live next, on my own.