CHOICES

I didn’t have a choice when my mother decided to have me out of wedlock. And it wasn’t because she so desperately wanted to have a daughter of her own; it was because her beliefs prevented her from choosing otherwise. The ones she was raised to uphold, even if her own life was in danger. So when she died giving birth, I was brought into a world where no one was ever going to answer for me or answer to me. No one was going to ever acknowledge what was to become my sense of injustice at having been given life without anyone’s consent - even my own.

I didn’t have a choice when I was sent to a children’s home that treated the kids as numbers on a spreadsheet, the ones that would balance the checkbook. Even there, no one cared enough to ask me the simplest questions ranging from my well-being to what I wanted to be when I grew up. No one told me that in life, there were points where you needed to stop and decide which road you were going to go down, which door you wanted to open. No one taught me that these decisions would later be reflected back at you as “choices” and that they were something you had to be responsible for. But then why didn’t anyone take responsibility for me? Looking back on it now, I think maybe, I was never really taught anything.

So when I was eventually sent to school, the inevitable bullying began and I was called all variations of the cruelest names. The worst part wasn’t even the violence; it was the fact that there was nothing I could say in return. Everything they were saying about me was true, so I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to resent them for pointing it out or resent myself for not being able to do anything about it. What could I do against such reckless hate, especially when it sometimes felt like honesty? Naturally, I ended up spending most of my time alone and would skip school when I felt like it, because I knew no one would notice.

Days blurred into weeks and months, and before I knew it, I was told that in a few years I’d no longer be allowed to live in the children’s home and that I needed to find a place for myself. I had no friends, no family and no money. I was failing school and had no skills to speak of. The only job I could get was washing dishes at a local diner, where I was sure I would be for the rest of my life. But on one of those dreaded days, someone noticed me. A girl who was making a delivery, refiling our soda machine. She was new, someone I hadn’t seen before and I only noticed her because of her purple hair. We said hello as she was bringing in the powder and I went back to finishing up the last pile of dishes.

“How long have you been working here? I feel like you can’t be much older than I am.”

At first I didn’t answer because I didn’t even know she was talking to me. When she rapped on the countertop next to my sink and waved her hand at me, I thought she was pointing out something I was doing wrong, but turns out she was just curious and wanted to know why I wasn’t answering her.

“Oh, um… For about a year now. Yeah, 11 months.”

“Right, okay. I just moved here recently, my parents sort of sent me away to live with my grandfather for a while. I think they want to believe he’ll set me straight. Pun intended.”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say to that. So I just nodded and went back to my business. She didn’t leave.

“What’s your name?”

“Catherine.”

“Classic. Did your mom name you after her mom?”

She asked the question, so I answered. As the deluge of words poured out of my mouth and into her unprepared ears, I never even questioned why I was telling her all this; I simply had to. It was like something inside of me broke loose, and I heard myself give voice to emotions I didn’t know I had, stories I hadn’t heard before. When I finished, I was almost out of breath from talking so much - I couldn’t remember when I had ever done that. She sat there, still, yet her face didn’t betray any signs of disgust or surprise which were the two sentiments I was most familiar with.

“I’m sorry,” was all she said before asking me if I wanted to go for a drink after.

I didn’t have a choice in what followed: our daily calls, her waiting for me after work, our first kiss, the first time we slept together. She asked me if I liked girls and I told her I wasn’t sure I liked anybody. To her, my answer must have been less than satisfactory and she always doubted whether I really wanted to be with her. To me, what I wanted mattered less. She chose me, and that was more than I had dreamt was possible.

A few months later, Kelly quit her job, saying that she realized she could make better money handling “packages.” At first, I didn’t think twice about it and though I eventually found out that she was dealing, I didn’t stop her either because I never really thought that it was my place to tell her what to do with her life. I had never known any intervention in my own, so it seemed nonsensical for me to do it to someone else. When she started dabbling in the stuff that she was dealing and introducing me to them, I thought that going along for the ride was what a good partner was supposed to do. The other alternative was that she’d probably leave me, but that was not an option for me at that point. I never wanted to go back to the version of my life where I felt invisible.

We started running out of money to pay for our habit, and no one would hire us. Maybe they could smell the drugs and the desperation that was bound to be emanating from me but at that point, we were so far gone that it was hard for either of us to make logical decisions. So I want to say that I didn’t have a choice when Kelly said she needed my help with a plan she had to secure some much needed cash. She overheard her mother talking to her grandfather about his life savings that he was keeping inside the house. Her mother was telling him to move it, that it probably wasn’t safe there. Her grandfather lived a few towns away, so Kelly needed me to drive her - she had lost her license at that point and I had barely managed to keep mine. She said she’d just talk him into loaning her some money, just to hold us over until our next paycheck. How could I have said no?

It wasn’t possible to say no to her as she started screaming for me to get us the hell out of there, her hands bloodied after leaving her grandfather’s house. I didn’t ask about what happened; I didn’t need to. I had no choice but to pretend like I wasn’t aware of what’s happening. I thought if I kept silent, then this whole thing would be a secret between the two of us, and Kelly wouldn’t have to face any consequences if we just drove away, away from anyone or anything we knew. Because I couldn’t believe that I was of enough importance for people to come looking after me, that anything I did would actually have an impact on anything. It’s like thinking that if I closed my eyes, then the world couldn’t see me either. In a moment where I desperately wanted to be invisible, I was the most visible. Even wanted.

So we drove to places we had never been before. We ate at fancy restaurants, bought clothes that we could only dream of stealing before. We did more drugs. We didn’t act like the money was going to be our only chance at survival; we acted as if we won the lottery. I think a part of us knew, there wasn’t going to be a viable path to a future. We knew that this was our last chance at a normal life, our last chance at a snippet of the kind of happiness we knew other people had. At this point, Kelly was manic and I, her indulgent therapist.

Eventually, the police caught up with us - we weren’t exactly the best people to be committing the perfect crime. Our tails were short and they made short work of us. The trial made headlines, a girl killing her grandfather in cold blood. They hashed out details about Kelly that I didn’t even know, how she was diagnosed with mental illness and how I, her apparent lover, was an accomplice to the crime. All I said in my defense was that I didn’t know that this was what it would lead to, but no one believed me. They only asked about when we started taking drugs together and when we had lost our jobs. Why didn’t they ask about how we met, and why I was at the diner in the first place? Why didn’t they wonder about what kind of paths would lead two teenagers to this courtroom, what kind of choices or decisions would they - or could they - have made?

Sitting here in my cell, I wonder if there was a point in my story where I could have gone down the other path, and if I could get a second chance at life, would I have done things differently? The truth is, I still can’t imagine having gone down any other path because I never felt like I was an active participant in my life. From the minute I was born, things happened to me. There are countless other lives that resemble mine. None of us choose to do wrong or choose to do evil. We do the thing that we believe is best for us in that moment in time.

So whenever you feel that you have a choice to make, be grateful. It’s a privilege.