While we sit in our comfy beds this morning, a father cries bitter tears of joy and relief. His only remaining son not injected with the serum of redemption. One murder for another. If you premeditated enough. If you committed it along side another crime. Or if it fits just right to what we are trying to do here.
We stand and vote and walk and protest the lives of the unborn in a womb that brings less than it should and our protection over that child ends the day it breathes fresh air. We damn it for hitting kids in school. We blame him for not bringing back his homework. Yes, baby, that homework that his parent wasn't there to help him do, either. *Even the privileged, caucasian parent can be absent* He starts dreading that moment that the teacher asks for it to be turned in and he doesn't know it but she can read him like a book that speaks of anxiety and despair that his little shoulders can't carry yet. And when he stops showing up to school, that teacher, she knows she is loosing him to the games and pipes in the street, or just to the -hush- cannabis. Because in the cloud of halted neuron pathways he is ok without the pages filled in and the looks he thinks are of judgement.
He sits and jokes with his friends about freedom. About having no goddammed parents to nag him for needing help with his homework, or wasting his days on a plant. Like we joked with Andrés in 5th grade about suicide. When we said it would be the best way to die because, you know, REMEMBRANCE. No, we didn't go into detail but 5 years later when we were long distanced and he put that noose around his neck and jumped out his window it still felt like we planned it together. Just like a kid, waiting in a dark house, for your family to get home from dinner celebrating your college acceptance. Bursting bullets into chests as they stumble in like dominos and aiming that last one at your leg so the police don't look at you. Only you forgot to tell him to steal something, Whitaker. Such rookie mistake.
But here you are, frontal-lobe half-developed, thinking that loosing the only people that ever loved you is actually going to buy you the freedom to sit and stare, for a lifetime. Baby boy, you lost everything that night. A father awakens from surgery, stable. Your son is arrested. Everything you built lost to the barrel of a gun, 50 miles from where I live and your only legacy sits in a jail cell, rotting until the day his blood can somehow pay the price for some more of your blood that doesn't run anymore.
Tell me how the death of one man can bring justice to the generations that come after. The ones that don't get the chance to write a letter. The ones that do not get to show up, in person, to look him in the eye and ask the why's. And god forbid- the eyes that get to watch catharsis. Eyes that have seen pools of crimson do not need to witness more violence. *I didn't write these words but they are perfect* My heart did soar when I saw him die, but what it really needed was to forgive. He didn't deserve it - but I did.
Cut to: our wildest immature dreams coming to reality. The nights of sneaking out. The fantasies of gang rape. The discussions of memorable ways to die. I wonder what would happen if our worst desires came to fruition and we were forced to relive them daily. To sit and pay for them. Even just to get the privilege to redeem the stupidity with our blood. But I will tell you honestly, there is no crime I can commit that will be cleansed by my life, or that of the most pious virgin- for that matter. We fight more to keep the fetus alive than to heal the broken man in a system that we pay for through sweat and bitter tears and the bitter years just tic toc along until you tie a noose around your neck because all your life was worth was one epic remembrance or 5 quarts of revenge.
I breathe a sigh of relief along with the father, today. We have robbed you of enough.
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