Love is Just Dandy

Introduction: 

This is not a love story.  It’s not really a story at all.  It’s just life.  Life from a perspective few people ever get the chance to see, words one rarely has access to; that is, through the eyes and lips of a convicted murderer, and the woman who loves him. Keep an open mind; many will say it’s just too crazy to be true, but with my mind open, I managed to find happiness where no one else was looking.  

Once upon a time, life was easy.  Lives were had, work was done, babies were born, children were reared for family business, elders died, and such was the cycle of life.  It was short and it was simple.  But that was long before you or I ever stepped foot in it.  Each generation besieges new conquests and typically gives up on them before the mountain crest is ever within range of sight.  Few will peak, and fewer will conquer.  Most get lost trying to trace a former’s footprints; many die through lack of preparedness or sheer willpower faltering beneath their knees.  The majority just destroy themselves through a series of bad choices that take you farther off the main path and into the shadows.

Personally, my path to destruction wasn’t unique.  The older I get, the less unique I find I am. But in that, there is comfort, knowing how much we all royally screw up, make stupid mistakes, and find ourselves walking again.  Baby steps at first, but I was never much for the crutch, so it never took long to get me back in the hustle of life.  Betting and losing, betting and winning, betting my winnings and losing it all.  Nothing ever panned out too well for me. No one, though, can say I can’t cope.  People have seen me out of control, most definitely.  All of those people have also seen me shoulder the world; well, my world.  I can cope.  I have for over forty years.  I’m done with all that.  Coping isn’t living.  Loving, is living.  And that is why this is a life story. 

Parallel Lives 

Just over forty years ago, two babies were born on opposite sides of the country, both to mothers who loved their drugs more than their newborn child, and who were often forgotten to have existed.  Both mothers traded sex for drugs, and as their children cried for their mother, someone they’d never really know; they’d later get to know her only through the stories of others, all telling a different tale.  

These children, a boy and a girl, were left to their own devices, often ravaged by the traumas of poverty and neglect, enduring abuses of all sorts, and eventually expected to fend for themselves.  Barely teenagers, the boy and girl both finally had enough, and left.  One went to the streets to try and find a life among the dying, one went to family who didn’t care much, but legally and financially felt obligated to save face.  The same year, they both left the uncaring arms of their past and tried to carve out a future.  

Needless to say, it wasn’t smooth running for either.  One, at seventeen, found himself handcuffed and escorted off to jail; the other found herself running from the cops as they rounded the block while she held a shard of glass to a woman’s face.  One got away; one got forty years.  

I want to tell you this tale because all too often, lives parallel one another in ways we do not see with our eyes, and because of luck, or money, or social ties, or even corruption, one life gets to move forward, and the other gets frozen in time.    

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I am the woman who loves him.  How, exactly, this happened, is a complicated equation to figure out.  But it did.  Raised by a man of the law, I was taught that bad choices came from bad people, and redemption didn’t exist.  My family didn’t know me well enough to see that I was making bad choices, and yet, they thought of me as a good person.  The hypocrisy was not lost on me, even as a teenager.  I knew they were wrong.  I knew wonderful people who made mistakes daily, and I cared about them, if for no other reason than, I could secretly relate to them, and not at all to my family.

It becomes difficult to place blame, really.  My grandmother held the family shame in her uterus, and bore scars from the wire hanger that missed the entity that would become my uncle.  She became an urban legend, the unwed teenager, sent to her aunt’s farm to live out the pregnancy.  My grandpa was still in high school and eventually they married, though through hindsight, it’d been better if they hadn’t.  But that’s someone else’s story.    

These are the two who ultimately raised me to believe that people were generally bad and I would always be alone and that I can and should only count on myself.  It’s shocking how embedded into my brain that message really became.  Only recently have I been able to let it go.  Two deaths create this story.  Three if you count my own.