I stand in front of my mirror sometimes and ask myself what it is about me that was so unlovable? Why didn’t everyone around me see that I was hurting and was so sad? Didn’t anybody notice how much it hurt to not get chosen when picking teams? Didn’t anyone care that I wanted to be asked to come and play too? Who did I have left to turn to when my friends started acting awkwardly around me because I was different? Who was it that first told me that I wasn’t good enough?

Did you ever not want to go to school after Christmas break because you knew someone would inevitably ask you what you got for Christmas, and you would have to lie and make up a bunch of fantastic gifts because the truth was that your family couldn’t afford any Christmas?

Christmas to me was when the old ladies at church would come by the house on Christmas Eve and leave bags of old unwanted canned food and Christian Bible tracts, coloring books and stale candy in red plastic net stockings, so we would have something to eat on Christmas day. If we were really lucky, we’d get to go to a local thrift store and pick out old, used, mothball-smelling clothes to give each other as Christmas presents. I know I sound ungrateful, and that is a slippery slope considering that I can still hear the same old ladies at church whispering things behind their hands like “vermin” and “white trash” and “that sissy one is already lost to hell.” I always thought they must be talking about someone else because they would pat my head and tell my mother what a beautiful family she had when she would come over to shoo us away from the preacher’s wife and sisters. I was not accepted or treated kindly by the church when I didn’t act “masculine” like the other boys around me.

I also remember my 5th grade teacher telling me in front of the whole class not to pet the class bunny rabbit because she didn’t want me giving it lice. “Long hair on boys causes lice,” she would say. She would also make me sit in the cloakroom during recess for not getting my parents to cut my hair. She said that it being so long was confusing the other boys in my class because I was “already too effeminate.” To have long hair and a high, lispy voice was just too much. She even had me go to speech therapy in an unsuccessful attempt to make my voice lower and not so “sissy.” “Queers talk like you do… and nobody likes you because you talk like a queer,” she explained.

Those are just some of the things I think about laying here in my prison bunk at night.

I remember and revisit all the different things that have happened in my life, and I try to make sense of why? Why were people so mean and cruel to me? Just because I was different and didn’t fit the mold of what others found comfortable.

Sometimes it’s just so overwhelming and I get really depressed and sad. But then sometimes I am able to focus on an old story my dad once told me as a boy about his time in prison too. I remember sitting in his lap in the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary visiting room tracing the long white scars that crisscrossed the inside of his left forearm and wrist with my little finger tips and asking him what happened to his arm. He told me quite frankly that some of the guards had come to his cell one night and told him that his wife and kids had been killed in a car wreck…that he just didn’t want to be in the world without us. I guess this was a game the guards would play for perverse entertainment as after his suicide attempt, he found out that they would do that from time to time just to see someone break down mentally.
He would tell me about how he would lay in his bunk at night and think about his wife and kids out there somewhere all on their own. Abandoned.

He would also tell me how after everything settled down at night and it got so quite that you could hear the wind blow down the side of the mountain. That he would wait and listen for the old rusty gate to the prison graveyard up on the side of that lonely mountain to start moving and squeaking in the wind. He would tell me that every time that old gate creaked in the night that the old timers would say that the graveyard was calling out for its next addition. Sure enough, at the morning count the guards would find some poor soul dead in their bunk.

How sobering it is for me now to realize that old graveyard almost got Dad. It is also quite sad that I have also felt that overwhelming loneliness and despair that he felt way back then. To lay down every night and battle the demons of guilt and shame that torment you incessantly and to the point you will do anything to make them stop.

It’s then that I take comfort and strength in the fact that Dad made it through his ordeal and eventually came home to us.

I can do no less for him.

He gives me the strength to keep moving forward. Just knowing that he is there waiting for me like I waited and longed for him to come home all those long years ago. I owe to him the joy and satisfaction that he gave me by coming home and holding me in his strong arms… telling me he loved me and that everything was going to be alright now. We are together again and that’s all that matters.

We will sit out in the backyard together and he will tell me all the old stories about his childhood with his brothers and sisters now long gone from this world. He will tell me how my mother tried her best to hang on until I made it home but just didn’t have the strength left to overcome her failing body. He will tell me again how she asked for me on her death bed just as she was dying, and how he lied to her and told her that I had been allowed to come after all…that I was just outside in the hallway hugging and saying hello to everyone and would be right in. I know that lie was for her sake and to calm her as she slipped away. But just imagine having to live with the guilt and shame of knowing you are the reason your dad had to lie to your dying mother.

Maybe I did deserve all this after all?