"The judge just entered the courtroom and I can’t stop staring at him, so hard that he should have felt my dark pupils prick his skin.  He was an extremely thin man of sixty or so, but he was definitely not frail looking at all.  In fact, he looked extremely determined as he busied himself with the many files that were piled high before him.  As I continued to watch him, I noticed words etched on the wall above his head in old English lettering that read, “In God We Trust.”  But this wasn’t about God.  This was about the white haired man seated in the front of the courtroom who actually looked like what I figured God would look like in a long black robe, his hair white as the driven snow.  And in his hand was a gavel that resembled a magic wand that God might have carried in which He would raise high above His head to condemn to hell those who had lived their life displeasing to Him and with another wave of His large hands, send to heaven those that had done well.  “Well done my good and faithful servant, well done,” He’d say in his deep as rolling thunder voice.  But with this “god,” seated in front of me, it was neither heaven nor hell but jail or freedom.  When the judge finally opened his mouth to address the court, his voice was as penetrating and effective as I had imagined.

           

           Yes, he was like a god all right, I thought.  For he was the one who would decide the fate of someone I had loved more than I ever loved a man before.  He had been the man I wanted to have my kids with, travel with and be married to.  Those were my thoughts prior to having my world and my plans crash like a demolition ball against a building. 

           

          Suddenly I felt like I wanted to tell the judge something.  I knew that he could wave his magic wand and end it all.  He could end my dreams and my plans.  But what I did not realize at that time was that Eric was the one who did that and nobody else.  He had castrated our plans and the judge had nothing to do with the choices he had made.  Yet I still wondered as I watched him, how a man could be given so much power.  Oh how I had to fight the strong urge that quickly came upon me to run up to the bench and fall on my knees and plead with the judge.  I wanted to tell him the kind of person Eric was when he wasn’t getting high.  Tell him that the drugs my man had been consuming were because of issues that he hadn’t resolved in his life and that is what really changed him.  It was the drugs.  I wanted to push the blame somewhere else.  But by themselves drugs were harmless.  They lay like a helpless baby, unable to do much of anything.  You could take any drug and jump upon it crushing it.  You could throw it in the air and catch it.  You could take some gasoline and burn it or you could give it power by putting it in the hands of an addict.  It is the hand that reaches for the drugs that give it power.  Someone had to pick up the needle filled with heroin and shoot the liquid into his or her veins.  And someone had to roll the marijuana and put fire to it and inhale deeply, had to take the pills and swallow and the acid tab was just some color on a piece of paper until someone put it under their tongue.  Eric was the one that had decided to take the drug out of the other man’s hands, time and time again, giving it great power.

            

           Well, maybe I could tell the judge about the romantic guy that I had fallen in love with and who had been so popular in our neighborhood.  There was no one who didn’t know him or know of him.  It made me feel so proud to walk down Harlem’s streets with this guy and see the girls that he spoke to admiring me or the guys that he knew checking me out.  And he seemed like he didn’t notice or didn’t care about all of the attention he got.  And he was so romantic.  One week after we met he recorded his voice as he recited love poems to me on a cassette tape with some background music by Marvin Gaye and The Stylistics.

            I wanted to tell this judge about our dreams and the plans we had made while sitting on the park bench on 131st Street during a night in the summer when we had decided that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.  That night we had talked until three in the morning about marriage and children while listening to some slow jams on a boom box he had borrowed from his sister’s boyfriend.  Or maybe I could even tell Eric to stand up and tell the judge the story of how his oldest brother, only fifteen at the time, got run over by a cab, when Eric was just a little boy, and was instantly killed and let the judge see how deeply this still affected him.  Perhaps if I could just tell him that at 24, this man he was about to sentence still longed for the father he never knew.  God I wanted so desperately to put a face and a personality to one of those hundreds of files piled high before this “god.”  But instead, I sat stoic and watched the judge for what seemed like hundreds of hours as one by one, he determined the fate of the “files” as they came to life before him.  I am sure that to this judge these people were nothing more than the files that told their past and determined their future.  I began to pray silently, Please God, give us one more chance to right the wrongs. But I hadn’t done anything wrong except choosing to love the wrong man.  It really wasn’t that he was the wrong man.  I think he is the right man for me but he is also a man who hadn’t dealt with some heavy issues in his life.  I couldn’t help falling for him the way that I did.  It just happened the way things just happen sometimes.  Like when you’re hanging out with your friends and you don’t know what’s going to happen but you’re ready for whatever because you’re young and full of so much energy and you have no idea that this is going to be the night that is going to change your life forever.  Every body has a night like that.  It’s a night where you grow up in some way or you learn something about yourself.   For some young girls it’s an awakening night, where you have sex for the first time or fall in love for the first time or somebody dies and you understand that you are immortal for the first time.  For me, it was the night where my girlfriend and I just wanted to enjoy a simple Friday night out on the town but ended with me meeting not just any man, but him."