“I’ll always love my life”

Today I got more out of Christian than I have all four weeks leading up to today combined. I spent the first half writing down the story he wanted to include in the book while he dictated it to me. I knew that he didn’t enjoy writing, so this was a great way for us to work together. I learned that he is facing 20 years in prison and is hoping for juvenile life because of gun charges.

After Christian had finished dictating his story to me, we found ourselves talking about life goals. He told me that his goal in life was to become a lawyer or maybe a businessman. “If I was a lawyer, I would know whassup because I’ve been in the streets,” he told me. He also mentioned that he wanted to take care of his parents. He wanted to make enough money, clean money that is, for them so they never had to work again. He spoke so highly of his dad and how he worked so hard to put food on the table and pay the bills, that I started to wonder how Christian could have turned to the streets with that good of a role model to look up to. Then he started talking about how all his cousins are in prison, and that’s when I realized that no matter how many great role models you have, the bad role models can be a lot easier to give in to.

Something that I have noticed is that there are definitely two sides to Christian. He was telling me about how during the days leading up to his court hearing last week, he stayed in his old juvenile detention center in Manassas. He told me that one day he was sitting in lunch and a resident came up and told him to get up and out of his seat. From there things escalated quickly and Christian told me how they started beating each other and the guards had to rip them apart. He had scratch marks all over his arms and he said his shirt ripped from the force of the guards tearing him off the other resident. Then, only minutes later, he was talking about his goals to provide clean money for his family and his baby niece. He couldn’t stop talking about how adorable she is and how he has so many pictures of her in his room. I guess this just shows how engrained violence is in his everyday life. To him it’s a regular occurrence. In fact, when I told him I had never seen a fight in real life his eyes visibly got wider like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He responded with his usual “that’s whassup” and I feel like he was a little envious. He even told me that the first thing he is going to do when he gets out is buy a gun so he can protect himself from those “out to get” him. I found this incredibly infuriating because he had literally just told me seconds before this that when he got out he was going to try to be a different person.

Something that caught me off guard was the fact that Christian said “I’ll always love my life.” He said this after I had finished writing his story down, but I immediately asked if I could include it because I thought it would be a nice closing phrase to his story. I was very curious, however, what he loved about his life, but I worried the question “well, what do you love about it?” would make it seem like there wasn’t much to love, if that makes sense. But, I’m honestly curious why he will always love it, and the more I type this the more I’m kicking myself for not asking. I feel like if I was in his position I would hate my life, or at least a majority of it.