🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
I wonder if you have ever had this experience: After having known a person for some time, years even, you have a moment in which it feels you are meeting them for the first time.
When I was 15 years od, just about to turn 16, I was released from a juvenile facility for yet another act of violence. It was not my first time being locked up, nor my last. Even my welcome home party had the feel that it was masquerading as a going away party. Everybody knew where I was going by then, and it was just a matter of time until I got there.
It was at one of these welcome back to going away gatherings where I ran into a friend of my younger sister. I had known her since I was 12, or so, so 3 years was a long acquaintanceship at that point in my life. In talking with her and my sister, we fell into a familiar banter of older brother condescending to a younger sister and her friend, up until biology took over. Those teenaged hormones that spew forth those subconsciously overwhelming pheromones cause her to change right before my eyes.
We all know that feeling.
I don’t want to belittle the emotion that was present by raising the seemingly crass biology of attraction, because I was no stranger to sex at that time. That is the drive of the biological mandate: sex. I do acknowledge the introduction of this variable into our relationship, but that did not change anything in the moment.
The change was that, in the familiar and companionable interaction of friendship, that attraction changed. It was not the attraction of sex, which was present with many of my sisters friends. Sexual attraction had moved to the corner of the room to sit in silence because it had dimmed in the light of the love that had stricken me.
Yes, a 15 year old in love. How cliché. Right?
No. And fuck you if you think so.
I had a lot of associates in my life at that time. I was selling drugs to support a lifestyle my family could not afford and that brought a lot of connections. I went to a lot of house parties, I was intelligent for an idiot, and I was charismatic. People gravitated towards me with such attraction that even my negative characteristics were overlooked.
Being overlooked does not feel good. It is not conductive to feeling accepted. Have you ever tried to interject a comment into a group conversation more than nonce and been completely ignored each time?
Imagine an entire life in which you feel so ignored. I was the “cool” kid. Epitomized. Something about being that guy, though, is that everyone wants the cool guy to know who they are. They never really wan to know the cool guy.
“Did you know Tim pulled a gun on Adam?”
“Did you hear who he slept with last weekend?”
“Do you see how much money he always has?”
Nobody wanted to know why he had a gun in the first place. Not even why he was so desperate to feel loved that he slept with so many girls. Especially not that he always had money because he sold drugs to stave off poverty.
Reasons wither in the limelight. The harsh glare doesn’t allow for gray areas: Only light and darkness. The audience never wants to see what is beyond the edge of that light.
Something different happened that night, though, and it is the single greatest gift God has ever blessed me with.
Acceptance. Real, honest, warts and all acceptance.
Here was a person who knew me. She knew my struggles with anger and how I often turned violent. But she also knew why. She knew the whys of many of my faults, and she accepted me as I was. Unconditionally.
There is a difference between the limelight of popularity and the sunlight of love. Limelight is sterile, harsh, and empty. Sunlight is warm, enlightening and nourishing. The whole time I strove and fought through my own darkness, trying to reach the light, I was dying from starvation in its glare.
This night, I didn’t need to struggle at all. I could just be and her light blessed me and enriched me.
It’s hard for me to say this for how I know it may feel for those I care about to read this, but the truth is a hard taskmaster: This was the first time in my life that I actually felt loved. That I believed I was worthy of being loved.
I did know that many people loved me. My mother loved me and made significant sacrifices for my betterment. Yet, the fact that, even now, I feel it necessary to qualify her love with those sacrifices places a grain of doubt in the belief. To know is not to believe, and up until this point I did not believe love existed.
Just obligation. Debts. I love them because…
She just loved me. No because: Just did.
When I was 18 years old and sitting in a county jail while awaiting the passing of a 6 to 14 year prison sentence for aggravated assaults, I was living in a cell with my uncle. I had just seen my father in a holding cell as I returned from sentencing, and my older brother and cousin were on a different block. All of that is actually true, just to give a taste of how normal this was to me.
This was very close to the end of a 3 year relationship with the love of my life and my uncle offered me his own words of advice. He explained to me how his relationship with my aunt had failed because she did not love him in return. In his words: “Love is a 2-way street.” He avered that if each person did not love each other equally, than it wasn’t love.
I brought the end into the middle to illustrate how, up to now, I have only mentioned her love and how it affected me. See, I disagree with my uncle… Love is one person’s offering, freely given. It is all that the Bible says: Kind, forgiving, patient, gentle, and much more. Unconditional.
She loved me without expecting anything in return. That’s not a two-way street. She loved me, even though she knew me. Her love gave me a sense of worth. I had never known that before. She loved me as I was, not because of what I was or could be.
I loved her back just as strongly, just as desperately. My life was utter chaos and I had such little value for my own life that I couldn’t possibly value much else. Any claim I made to the contrary would have been a lie to stave off the despair of the abyss I stared into when my gaze turned inward. They say that if you stare into the abyss long enough, it looks back.
I wish I could say that the love we shared enlightened us and corrected our faults and shortcomings. There are no happily ever afters in my world, though. As much as she wanted me to do better, to be better; I just didn’t know how. I said before how knowing I was loved did not translate to believing. I was loved. Well, believing in something better didn’t translate into knowing how to achieve that. I was too broken for an easy fix. And so was she.
I thank God everyday for the love that I came to know from her, but I also question why it took so long to break through my walls. That love burns in my heart today and feeds my soul with its hope. That love is what drives me to write any of this at all. It is also the impetus behind any and al positive change I have accomplished. I am absolutely a better man today than yesterday. I am, today, the best version of myself I have ever known. Not perfect, but better.
But why the fuck did it have to cost so much?
I would, still today, have rather named the cost at my own life. Yet I persists for reasons beyond my comprehension. Or, maybe for reasons within my arrested apprehension.
To return closer to my point, I was in a relationship with this one girl for 3 years. Right up until the arrest I mentioned. Our love survived my incarceration, but our relationship did not. In failing to are about myself I failed in my care for anyone else. She moved on physically, but by her letters I know she never moved on emotionally. Never did I.
As time passed and I was trapped in a relativity loop that exists for we incarcerated souls, her life passed me by. I did not begrudge her that in the least, but I couldn’t forgive myself. I closed off every nook and cranny that had let that light in so it couldn’t get in again. I won’t lose the same battle twice. I have heard it said that a man with nothing to lose is to be feared. That may be true, but a man who has lost something is far more terrifying. I had lost a love that defined my entire existence. One in darkness had seen a great light! But now, having known that light, he was deprived and it hurt exquisitely. If the Earl de Sade had known of such an infliction of pain he would have died in an orgasmic bliss. My God, it hurt. Still does, always will.
I was eventually released from prison, but I moved to a different city as had she, so contact was not imminent. We both asked my sister about the other, but stopped short of trying to reconnect. We were both afraid of the overwhelming power of the love that existed between us. Such passion hurt in ways nothing else can and we knew that.
Besides, I had shut all of that out. There is a unique aspect to the Hell inflicted upon a person who has everything they care about taken away and then are locked away to face themselves. If you want to know how damaging it is, look up Pennsylvania’s recidivism rates. They are close to the highest in the world.
Hell has not bred an Angel yet, so please don’t let it surprise you that I was damaged worse upon release than I was upon commitment. It took about a year until I was selling drugs again, and not long after before I was in prison again.
My arrest and crimes aren’t the topic here, so I want to point this moment to the power of the love I had learned to share. It is a two-sided as all life: Good/Bad, Hot/Cold, Strong/Weak. The two sides of the emotion I know as love are acceptance and rejection.
My older sister loved me and knew I loved her. When she found out I was facing life without the possibility of parole, she committed suicide. The added weight of these events send my older sister into an addictive downward spiral and led to my mother having a nervous breakdown. Love for me and from me had broken my family. Their acceptance then turned to a world shattering rejection. My love’s birthday was December 19. I think I died, too.
This is the burden I carry for those who hung their hopes and love on me. It’s an ever present splinter of the cross I bear.