Seventeen Crimes

Sixteen

 I am a writer by training. I am a writer by wanton desire to occupy and consume on the most intimate level every single word, every letter, every sound – to put it so bluntly, every jot and tittle of the written language.

I pulled essays out of my hind end at the eleventh house, having just crawled out of bed from whatever tryst I had or hangover I was experiencing and with little to no editing, handed in papers that over and over received an A.

I was able to pull thesis after thesis out of my ass with barely finished my source papers. Forget AI; I am the generation that grew up with their widespread advent and I am still a writer. Even as a journalist, I can turn in hard copy on a dime. In fact, I live to turn in hard copy.

When I started this journey, with the sudden, unexpected appearance of a brother I vaguely knew about – because yes, I heard trickles about my biological father, and more importantly, about the woman he married, I never thought I would write a book about my father.

But then, I never thought I'd spend time in a prison with no clue as to why I was ever imprisoned in the first place. But I have been a political prisoner, and now even more so. As I write this, I am a little over a week out from climbing in a Martian built rocket ship, piloted by a kid – my kid brother, no less.

I still don't know why I spent close to seventeen months in a holding cell.

I find myself in a cell of another making.

The door can be locked and unlocked at my will. I don't get verbally abused by guards with over-blown egos and highs from power trips.

Security has a key, but they haven't used it, to my knowledge. And they are the most courteous security guards I have ever met.

I am allowed to walk where I want outside, so long as I stay on the well-marked grounds of 'Mars'; I have been spending a lot of time outside, in the sun. Sunbathing, jogging, just sitting on the curb with my eyes closed and drinking in the solar rays, because in T-minus seven days, I won't be able to do any of that.

My packages are searched prior to delivery; its not for a lack of trust in me. And I try not to order things that would be problematic and confiscated.

There are some who say I shouldn't be so concerned about things like that, that I shouldn't have to be.

I won't name names – they are people that I have been friends with for a very long time. People that I thought of as my 'best friends'. People whom I celebrated the adoption of their first child; celebrated job promotions and even offered to be a surrogate. They declined.

Only in hindsight, I realize what blessing it was that they declined and went another direction. Had we gone through with it, I would have likely spent the last months of any pregnancy in prison for a crime that has never, never been articulated.

The outrage.

I am still so angry that I spent as long as I did in a prison cell, endured a schedule not my own, under orders from people that had no respect for me as a human being, let alone a woman and I don't know why.

My imprisonment has destroyed my life.

And it has set me free.

Its a weird dynamic; one that so many people struggle with seeing in their own circumstances and it does not escape me how blessed and fortunate I am that I see how it has set me free.

Yes, it destroyed my relationship. Actually, my imprisonment has destroyed nearly every relationship I had, from my work relationships, to my friends, to my very lover.

Oh, how I miss them.

But, just as the fence of the Martian Embassy here on Earth has a very real, very physical barrier, the fences, the boundaries in my life are just as real.

As an example: my mother.

Since I left home at eighteen: quite literally, I moved out of my mother's apartment on my eighteenth birthday, packing just a bag of my belongings into a knapsack and taking off without saying goodbye.

I told myself then that I had to do it that way; in hindsight, I agree with myself, but I would also add this: I should have reached out to my father sooner.

My relationship with that man is not fully repaired. We are speaking, passing video messages between Mars and Earth with great regularity. And more importantly, I have dug into and watched the cornucopia of videos that my father recorded and filed away for me, having learned details of his life, both through the Martian Program and his life on Mars.

And that life includes a step-mother that society would like to categorize as 'evil', but in reality, is probably more sympathetic and supportive than my own mother.

I have heard from Ginnifer.

I have not heard from my mother.

Now, there are a great plenty of people who would say that its perfectly fine that I haven't heard from my mother; there are critics who, just as loudly, would say the problem and fault is with me.

I say when her phone number changes or is disconnected and she doesn't bother to reach out to me with the new number, its on her. But perhaps I am being too bitter about it.

Because the story I have learned does not paint her in a good light, and I don't fully intend to spill the tea on all I know. She is entitled to her privacy, and there is a good change that she's loosing her privacy in the small way that I am discussing this now. I plead with you not to attack her. I plead with you not to harass her; those are tools of people immature in their walk and faith, whatever it may be. I have learned that very well.