The thoughts are blurry, the memories somehow lost.
The wounds are open, deep inside someone’s soul.
And it could take as little as looking at someone’s face in the street, then you’d see a mirrored image of your own soul.
I like to call them the ignored ones.
The ones for which there seems to be no justice, only judgement.
It’s a punishment they carry, until the day that they die. Yet when they die, that’s a vague event; there are so many ways to die. One can die in the hands of someone who once held them and kissed them, or the hands of one that raised them. Or again, you could just be dead, and still wandering an empty world.
You could also try to walk away… and try to find a place to call home. Yet home, that’s a vague thing, too; it could be a physical location. Or it could be a state of mind where you can give yourself the security and safety to laugh, to talk, to smile, to live a life and get by somehow.
I never met Debra Milke personally; I only heard of her from the lips of a man that was willing to give his freedom and life for her. I never heard anything so beautiful in my life. It was sort of unconditional; not love, but unconditional salvation. Maybe from another soul, this soul who had an identical pain and somehow it was a way to redeem and hope to find peace himself.
I read, one day, thoroughly her case, and I wonder how many people took the time to do the same. How many can identify with being ignored or being tossed away? Debbie is one of us, but I guess you could call her one of the few brave ones, and took all she had; her child, the eternal hope of her life. How could she not leave a monster and hope to believe in life? When you think that way, you believe in life. And if you believe in life, you will never take a life. When you take that big decision, the bravest of all; all you can think is, God will provide your food, your shelter, your health. When you think that way, you believe in hope. How can someone who believes in hope end a life?
A woman can give birth to a child, but it takes a mother to take the child and raise him against all odds. That, itself, is belief in life.
Though as I write these lines, I can not imagine how much pain she must feel in her heart to think of how everything she did ended in losing what she lived for. Once you take that brave decision in leaving a monster, your heart feels cold, almost like after you get stitches and your skin feels numb. You can see them healing but as you move you can feel the uncomfortable stitches and they hurt. You hold on to what you have, and you like to believe that everything after that is going to be alright.
She trusted someone who saw her vulnerable, though she saw a helping hand. One can meet the same monsters in different shapes and forms. It’s almost like a curse; once you’ve been hit once, they can smell you; they can smell your fear, they can smell the blood of your wounds and somehow they can do what they all know how to do; hurt you. In this case, Debbie was ready to spread her wings, which were almost healed. But you can not read minds or the bad intentions or viciousness of others.
I wonder how much pain she feels, remembering an excited little boy going to see Santa. What could’ve she done to stop this? How could’ve she stopped this? How can one stop the pain? How can we stop anyone from hurting us? Can anyone know… how to protect the ignored ones from the negligence, the thoughts, the intentions of others? How must’ve it felt to speak and not be heard, and to have every word you say twisted around? I’m sure some of us can understand that feeling. Your life beomes insignificant in the eyes of others. Because they only see what happened, but they refuse to hear anything else.
We live in a black and white world for people judge you for what they would’ve done. Yet all lives are different, there is no one way to live life.
A life that once walked in the direction towards a better future, a better life, turned into a mother losing her beloved child and put in a cold cell to pay for a crime she did not commit, because her life became be insignificant in the eyes of others. She will not only be killed by a cold blooded community who refuses to look at the facts, but by a government who only cares about their positions.
If you are alone and a single mother, that makes you easy and anyone can take advantage of you and make a fiasco of your life and dignity, for like that anyone can use their imagination, pass judgement. Like a little sheep attacked by a pack of wolves all at once. It can be imagined, the eyes of the 26 year old woman that used to live in that body, living a scene of her nightmares, remembering the dreams of her son in her arms and waking up in the sweat in the morning to continue living in hell, a world without hope and careless about life.
This group of people who will watch her die are no different from the men that killed her son and watched him die. As for her, she is living among the dead, because of the cruelty of her own people, her own town, her own country.
Debra Milke’s case continues to astonish and disgust me. There is literally no objective evidence against her, the major factor in her conviction being a “confession” produced by a detective who has created false confessions in other cases. We KNOW that she was not at the crime scene and did not participate in her son’s murder. It was claimed that she planned it, for which there is, once again, not a shred of evidence. Isn’t the American standard for conviction “proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”? Certainly not in Debra Milke’s case.