redeye's blog: "red eye moments"

In 2013, I was emotionally crippled. I would wake up each morning with a forlorn look to the alarm clock. I was serving another day of my sentence. I would mentally go through a list of my crimes, one by one: 

Capital Offenses: 

1. Father Who Abandoned His Family.

2. Failure at Marriage.

3. Not smart enough.

4. Not attractive enough.

5. Friendless.

6. Disappointment to those who loved me.

7. Smoker.

8. Poor judge of character.

I would carry this burden wherever I go. It was constantly reinforced by my ex-wife and the woman I mistook for someone entirely different. Maybe I made up the woman I knew for a month, only to peel back her green eyes and freckles and fiery red hair to reveal an all consuming beast, constantly denigrating me. My warden who had me by the leash with threats of suicide and violence. She signed my prisoner consent form in her own blood, the cuts still dripping from the night before when we argued about who would clean the feces up off the floor from the only two living beings that showed me any love: my fellow dogs.

I would grasp desperately to my one saving grace: I was good at my job. I would spend all night working and all morning and then all night the next day. Moments in between were spent smoking a cigarette loosely dangling from a shaking hand. Ocassionally a tsunami of weakness would tear me asunder and drown my mind with an escape plan. It would evaporate into the smoke filled air of a Sunday hangover. Mostly it would end with months of sobriety, overachieving at my job, and sobbing hysterically. I can see myself on the blood red couch, my mouth gaping as wide open as my heart, tears showering down in fountains from my eyes. Her mocking voice "You're just going to sit there crying all day like a big cry baby? What a retard! I can't believe you're just going to allow her to take your children away to some german pedophile. You are such a loser!"

One morning, I stopped sobbing and smoking long enough to decide to rejoin a site that I once loved being on. That was until she found it and made sure to humiliate me completely until I forced to delete profile. I felt temporarily strong and free. I felt like a phoenix beginning to rise from the charred ashes of yesterday. I joined and became a silent creature in the dark. I kept to myself mostly and just observed. That is because I had to cloak myself in a costume of invisibility: I was just a nobody unworthy of friends, unworthy of happiness. I could just watch them all enjoying what I could never have.

Something happened. They came to me in private, singing a choir of adoration, praising my every word. They wanted me. I felt a little less timid and began to open up to them. Instead of the condemnation and hatred I expected and thought myself deserving, they gave me respite. It began to make me strong. It began to make me want to fight for what I loved. 

It was as if the asteroid that had come diving into the earth to wipe out the great dinosaurs of the Triasic had never been. I walked this planet with all the ferocity of my formerly arrogant and elevated self. The person I once loved before I was taught to despise him started to show, only a little at first, just a spark reflected in my eyes that had been empty before. That spark became a star and the star began to rise and shine boldly in the darkness around me. 

I had a world where I was free to be me and I found the courage to fight for it. I began a perilous battle with my warden. I called her many bluffs, her threats to call the police, to make up lies, to destroy me and make everyone I loved hate me. I did not give an inch on Christmas Day even, that morning spent awake all night and starving, cramped in the corner of a dusty old room full of boxes hiding in a sleeping bag. Occassionally she would shriek like a banshee and throw things. I would duck and stare her down. My warden would not keep me any longer. Eventually, I began to walk free in the yard and my warden made herself her own prisoner. 

And since that day, I have battled every single person who would seek to control or manipulate me. I signed an oath to myself that I would remain strong and free and self-confident until the day I died. My old friends, my warden, my ex-wife, and everyone else could try to beat and threaten and torture me, but I would not go back into the cage. I knew when I was a passenger in the car, watching the old southern lights go on and off, replaced by casino's neon glare that I had overcome. When I arrived at Rowan Oak, the home of the man I once wanted to be, I knew that I was finally free.

"a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for the glory and least of all for profit…”