Totaled Focus

“There is a crack,

a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

That’s how the light gets in.”

                                    Leonard Cohen

I’m left sitting in my cell for another day. 

The light from the door jam is my only companion.

It sits with me while I await tomorrow.

Tomorrow holds the very same fate as today.

Light will be there.

            I have difficulty remembering most of the trial. I remember getting dressed in the morning before that first hearing. I wore my best suit but I couldn’t find my favorite tie. I wanted the tie that Joanne bought me four months before the car crash. She was on her way to the grocery store when she decided that all my ties were ratty and dated. It made me smile when she told me the story because she was never impulsive. She would always get on my case when I would come home with a random impulse buy. At least once a month, I would come home with a new toaster or some other gadget we didn’t need. “You need a new tie, all your ties are ugly” was her justification. I hated the tie at first, but after time I couldn’t go to a big meeting without it. Instead, I was stuck wearing my lime green tie that first day in court.

            I remember the jury deciding that Jim Maloney wasn’t guilty. I remember Jim shaking his lawyer’s hand with a relieved smile plastered stupidly on his face. I have the image of his stupid smile scorched into my brain permanently. He didn’t recognize me when we walked into the same convenience store three months later, but I recognized him. I followed him out into the parking lot and made sure that he would never forget my face. I’m sure he didn’t forget my face while he spent the last four hours of his life in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Peter’s Hospital. The defendant was found guilty at the next trial I attended.