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Chris, Hong Kong
I'm not sure how I got in touch with Lifelines -- or why, if I'm honest -- but I know it was soon after Troy Davis was executed. I was obviously looking at related websites because I became a member of Lifelines and they matched me with Hector. I had naively presumed I would get somebody who was framed, was unlucky, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody who I could easily sympathise with. I received Hector's details and immediately did what I was told not to do -- I googled his name. And I remember feeling that maybe I had made a massive mistake; had jumped in too quickly. So, right from the start, Hector was challenging my beliefs -- was I really so non-judgemental and 'liberal'? So, as I recall, I sent a postcard to Hector with a brief introduction and waited ...
Writing to Hector is like writing to myself -- if things had turned out a little differently, it could be me. I don't mean if I was born in El Salvador. I mean that Hector isn't 'evil' or a 'monster' -- he's just normal. Which can make me ask -- how different am I really? What am I capable of? I think most people have a dark side, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. Hector's my age, he was married and had two kids, he worked hard and tried to provide. There's a certain irony that he left a country ravaged by an American-funded civil war and then went to America to start a new life; now that same country is determined to end it. But other than that, we're the same. And when I think of Hector, even though I am not really religious as such, I think 'There but for the grace of God'.
I initially didn't want to share some of the happy stuff or the trivial stuff because it would seem insensitive or superficial -- but in the end that was the whole point: to share what's going on in my life. I'd like to think he doesn't judge me in the same way I hope he knows I don't judge him. That's not my business, just as it isn't my business to absolve anyone -- not that he would ever ask me for that anyway. I just think the whole business is incredibly sad.
I have made huge life-changing mistakes in my life, but in the end, things worked out OK for me. But I was lucky and was given a second chance. I often think abut how life can change in split second, how one wrong decision and there are no more second chances and no going back -- that's scary. I don't really know why Hector and I were put together in this way -- was it chance, fate or some massive cosmic coincidence -- but I don't like the idea that certain people should be denied the chance to have a friend to talk to. Everyone, I think, deserves to have somebody to listen to them.
There is a big elephant in the room that Hector and I share, and we can't go there for reasons born of both pragmatism and compassion. I don't need 'to know'. I'm father to two lovely young girls whom I adore, but that love and responsibility can be overwhelming sometimes. There's something humbling about sharing stuff with a guy who is facing death, and have him respond with his experiences, or with a joke. He has to contend with a lot in prison and he does it with far more dignity than I suspect I would. Without disregarding what did or did not happen, Hector has my admiration. Just because he's inside and I'm on the outside, doesn't mean I have all the answers and this is a one-way relationship. I hope he gets as much from me as I do from him.
In life, it's hard most of the time to develop a bond in regular circumstances, but, when some years ago I had the chance to start corresponding with my friend Chris, it all came flowing easily. In my mind now he has become a close friend I never had out here -- not a penpal anymore. Regardless of still writing with ink, he has become really close in a few ways, especially because I felt from the beginning some attraction in the similarities of his life and mine, with a young family, and some ugly issues that come in life sometimes. And we have to struggle to survive, not especially for our own benefit but for the better of our families. Yes, once, too, I had a family -- wife and two beautiful kids.
A relationship of this kind between Chris and me is a window in development to your world -- to fully still live -- not like the feeling daily without friends of families under the weight of the US system of sub-human, undergrading 'thing' out here. So sometimes it's hard to develop inside here anything but distrust, even to your own shadow ... that kind of thinking is that a friend outside of this hole can change -- erase, because when I think of Chris and his life, I see that I am still fully human regardless of my mistakes over the span of life, like a regular citizen outside.
The relationship with my friend was built on honesty, nothing can grow for long without I believe. When it all came to the crime I was convicted, he has never asked point blank if I did it or not. That discretion is really considerate -- smart and human -- given that in here in this position, honesty plays a tricky part that can lead you to a swift death without mercy by this system if you are guilty to the last bone of the crime you are deemed to die for it.
Usually a person who asks you if you are guilty or not in this position, it just goes to show how naive it is -- and evil with his unconsciousness, because at the end is helping his execution by any statement of admission -- by omission you might call it. That's why friends like Chris are not easy to find. He knows that with patience, questions of a certain kind are not necessary, especially when the concept of life is really short and Lady Death is smelling your hide already ...
My words might seem dull to most people with not much patience for people like me, unschooled that much 9th grade in my country of El Salvador, but by now Chris understands me a bit more, regardless of a world apart from this prison.
Obviously this road is still building it by itself, the bits we share on life's present or past ...
Chris, lives in Hong Kong,
Hector is El Salvadorian,
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