Iowa Essays

 

 

Out where the road turns to gravel is where you’ll find it.  A giant rock quarry on the left, filled in with a gray sort of sludge; and on the right, at least a square mile of barbed wire fencing, razor wire coiled above the chain link, obscuring the view of the brick guard towers that look like something out of a video game involving short swords and knights.  In a reversal of fortune, however, it is my prince who is waiting to be rescued from this tower, and I, a chain smoking princess standing in the parking lot in the cold November air willing myself to go inside.  

But I do it.  And it isn’t so bad.  It’s like the airport, only without a line – merely a bored guard with coifed blond hair staring at her fingernails and smacking gum as I walk through.  I’m waiting for the director to yell ‘cut,’ but instead it’s eerily quiet, so I keep walking the path they tell me, through gate after gate.  I get buzzed into the visiting room by a short man in a white collared shirt and he easily sizes me up as fresh meat.  

“Relationship to the offender?” he asks.  

I say friend with confidence, but he just shakes his head.

“Friend with a grin.”  He pretends to study the half sheet of paperwork I have given him and tells me to follow his ‘worker,’ an inmate in gray prison pants and a white Hanes t-shirt, to a cushioned vinyl bench where I am assigned to wait for my beloved for agonizing minutes.  

 

I have driven the long four hours down here on my psychiatrist’s advice.  He gave it to me nine years ago, and I’ve been ‘sleeping on it’ since then.  Traveling back and forth across the country, trying to shake the shadows I was sure I could simply leave behind.  But Brian’s letters continued to find me even in the dead of winter in Oregon.  Or tales of his failed phone calls to my mother’s house. With or without my acknowledgement, my past existed and if I wanted a future, I was going to have to face it.  

I aspire to work with gifted students someday, especially those at risk of straying from a successful path.  But someone once asked me how I could heal others if I hadn’t first healed myself?  I had accomplished things, yes.  And my body was fine.  Hell, I was training to run a marathon.  But spiritually and emotionally I was still full of holes, and in order to truly to the good work I wanted to do in the world, I was going to have to fill them in, or be stuck in a sort of limbo state forever.  

 

I sit alone on a vinyl bench for what seems like hours but is actually only about thirty minutes.  Brian doesn’t know that I’m coming on this day.  I’ve chosen to surprise him.  So he won’t be prepared and waiting in his cell for the guards to come get him.  When he does arrive, his face looks first confused, then shocked, then elated.  I go up to the white taped off area to greet him and the comfort of his arms tells me the only story I really needed to know.  He doesn’t want to let go.  Or rather, he hasn’t let go, in all these years of a love I thought was lost to another possible universe, forever.

We walk in silence back to our assigned seat and for a while he just stares at me while I stare out the window.  

“What?” I ask and he grins that infamous grin.

“Nothing.  I’m just looking at you.”  He pauses.  “Wow.”

His voice takes on a sort of breathless quality, like a six year old who has just come downstairs on Christmas morning to find a bright shiny bicycle, complete with a bell just waiting to be rung.  

I have a hard time looking at him for fear of being overcome by an affection that had lain long dormant.  Instead I sneak glances out of the corner of my eye.  Become defensive.  We make sarcastic jokes at each other and though I was sure I would cry, we laugh and laugh for the whole two hours.  

 

Brian has done well for himself, in as much as was possible.  He hit a low point, much like I did, where he had to choose to either take control of the rest of his life or succumb to despair entirely.  He chose, as did I, to rise.  Now he is a peer mentor for younger guys in the substance abuse program, he has an office job at the metal shop, and he is a spiritual leader for the Wiccan community inside.  He has read voraciously, more even than I, and he writes short stories in his long hours of spare time.  He has learned to play guitar and plays in two bands, is on a softball team in the summer, and lifts weights.  And he is eternally optimistic about his life after these final four years are over with.  His eyes are bright, his hands are warm, and his face radiates a cautious hope.  

“Prison changes a man,” everyone tells me, but it isn’t true this time.  He has grown, yes, but in ways that are good and solid.  Like me, he has lived these past years clutching a dream close to his heart and refusing to let them take it from him.  And now, it seems, the dream might just come true.  

 

Before I even leave the parking lot of the penitentiary, I know that my decision has already been made.  I loved him 11 years ago and I love my Loki still. I thought I had come to close a door but instead I threw one wide open.  Turns out I had just been stuck in one long fall and finally it was time for me to land. 

I pass signs for Truman state on the way back to Iowa and I think of all the students who are just settling in to a new school season.  For some it will be their first, others their last.  I think of the sweltering day I moved into my own Missouri dorm room, full of a vision of the future, full of hope.  Full of dreams that I would soon be forced to bury, but not so deep that I haven’t been able to pull them out on this balmy September day, dust them off and hold them to the light once more.  

 

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