Waking up to punishment, day after day, year after year, is a hell of a thing, and I do mean hell. I can’t label it as a journey that I am on. No. This is not a “journey,” this is a living nightmare, quite literally. The emotional weight and burden of causing a catastrophic event is unbearable, and prison only amplifies the burden. How is one suppose to live in the wake of taking a life? How is a person supposed to redeem their reckless and evil ways? Keeping the mind busy is one way. Yet, I know that shame, remorse, grief, guilt, and pain will live with me for the rest of my life. Agony is alive within me, and it’s not good enough for it to be mitigated, I must make friends with it or it’ll eat me alive.
I wish I could lie to myself and live in a fantasy world powered by drugs and alcohol, completely devoid of reality, but my conscience is alive and well, never letting me up, never allowing me to forgive myself. From my perspective, forgiving myself is tantamount to making light of my offense. But I’m here, learning from those who came before me, to seek light in the darkness, in the midst of errors and enemies, in the midst of death and destitute, in the midst of ignorance and chaos, in the midst of idiocy and debasement, in the midst of incompetence and foolishness, in the midst of pure hatred.
Yet, despite the fact that I am in the fire of evil, I am also in the midst of moral, ethical, and communal obligations. And for that I am committed to harnessing my agony into positive action, in my commitment to the wellbeing of others. Yes, the contrast is stark. However, darkness motivates me to do my part in safeguarding others from falling prey to it.
It’s easy to get lost in a busy world that’s comprised of successes and failures, hopes and dreams, griefs and losses. It’s easy to treat people to disastrous effect. It takes great strength, intentional focus, and a bulldog of a character to upend darkness by doing the exact opposite, building relationships instead of destroying them. Relationships stand as the foundation for flourishing, prosperity, and peace. It took inadvertently taking a life for me to learn to esteem relationships to the highest regard, and to put conflict in its place, where it doesn’t belong, in between the relationship.
There must be a healthy differentiation between how we treat the relationship and how we treat the offense or conflict that’s been wedged in between the relationship. We cannot treat the person as the source of the conflict (even if they may have been). Rather, we must remove the wedge of conflict by lovingly agreeing to disagree, or by peaceably parting ways (in an toxic or abusive situation). For the sake of generational harmonic coexistence, we must never lose our heart for one another by committing to actions that benefit the wellbeing of ourselves and those who we come into disagreement, offense or conflict with.
I hope you too will not allow for conflict to take precedent over your relationships. I hope you too will not have to learn these lessons through acts of negligence, cruelty or recklessness. My hope is that you remember my painful lessons and use them to treat all human beings with dignity, honor, and respect, even if it isn’t being reciprocated. Life does not have to be defined by tit for tat. Life can be defined by peace, mercy, and radical love, which is desperately needed for all, especially for those on the wrong side of the stick, who are serving a sentence filled with daily painful reminders of hatred and cruelty.