Rememberance

A few months before the final end of my ill-starred marriage years ago, I had a temp job at a big Halloween-costume factory store. It was a fun job, wearing costumes, counseling customers around their disguise, getting side-jobs as a makeup artist.

I met two people there.

One was a beautiful woman, whose name I am ashamed to say I do not remember. She, like me, was in an abusive marriage and afraid to get out. Somewhere inside me I found the courage to help her do what I could not. There were several weeks of bargaining and wavering. I helped her get away, and I stayed several scary nights with her in her apartment while her ex beat on the door. We cowered in her bed and turned up the volume on 3am Oprah re-runs. Eventually he gave up. There were several weeks of tears and I made her a birthday party a week later to help her cheer up. In helping her I learned about what I could and would do when my time came.

I don't know where she is now.

I prayed for her tonight.

Another was a beautiful boy named Jesse. All the blond cheerleader teenage employees were drooling after him, being too young and innocent to have any sense of gaydar. Jesse and I somehow bonded instantly. He was a mess, lovely and vulnerable, also with a taste in abusive men. He was funny, bold...lovely, lovable, fragile and joyful and childlike despite his almost thirty years. I was a mess, a child bride, frightened, lonely, overworked with no sense of fun. I found in Jesse the solace and attention and care-free, strings-free love I had always missed, and he found in me a confidant, a protector, a loyal and gentle friend. Jesse gave me the adolescence I'd missed along the way. I got to pretend to be bad, after so many years of being the good one. We played jokes, we walked around the mall wisecracking. He took me to my first drag show. We shared cigarettes outside unspeakably filthy bars. I got into my one and only physical fight defending him in a bar fight. (I won, though I still bear the scar to prove it.) One of the few gay bars in our southern town was also the only goth bar, once a week. We'd dress up in baby-goth drag, calling ourselves the "Dark Children," both skinny kids, me a dapper, hip young man with huge eyes, and him my slithery date in too much eyeliner. We'd go out and dance till 3 am. I was still underage, so he'd buy gin and tonics and we'd share them, giggling, in adjoining stalls in the men's room, passing the glass back and forth under the partition. I loved him. When I finally fled my terrible, abused existence, we lost touch.

I don't know where he is now.

I prayed for him tonight.

I've been grieved many times over the fate of these troubled lost friends. My prayer is that they have both been somehow lead to a place of faith and healing, like me. Slowly, step by step.

I pray for them tonight.

I remebered the first friend's name. It was Diamond.