A Year Later

It has been almost eleven months since my high school English teacher, Prudence Hockley, was beaten to death by her boyfriend.

It's not fine, but most of the time I am. I wake up in the morning and eat my breakfast and drink my tea and play my guitar and it's possible, with my nose buried in the pages of a poetry book, for me to forget that I belong to a world in which extraordinary people die.

Then I look at Hockley's picture, as I have every day for nearly a year, and I can't comprehend how there's any good left in this universe without her. I don't want to be part of a world in which a woman as physically and mentally strong as Prudence Hockley, a woman who took no nonsense from anyone, was rendered a victim by a man who was supposed to love her.

I wish I could be one of those people whose anger at being wronged fades with time like a long, slow exhale, and while their hurt never disappears they find it in themselves to forgive. But every time I look at Hockley's picture I am filled with rage and paralyzing sadness. I had a conversation recently with a friend who said he doubted I had it in me to hate anyone. Though I agreed, it was wishful thinking. It seems impossible that I will ever stop hating Johnnie Lee Wiggins for murdering the best teacher I ever had, and one of the most important people in my life. I see her smile and imagine her hopping onto a desk in her four-inch heels to shout Lady Macbeth's "damned spot" soliloquy into the ceiling and the rush of pain is enough, even a year after her death, to collapse me.

I've always shrugged away compliments, but Hockley was the only person who could tell me my ideas were valid and my mind and soul beautiful who I ever believed. When she called me "darling heart" I felt truly valuable. She was proud of me and I can't recall a single day of class during which she did not say so. Even the first day of school when my classmates and I filed into her room a horde of strangers, her first words to us were, "I don't know you but I love you already." It was as if seven seconds in her presence was all it took to make us hers. And it was. And we were. We are.

I think of you every day, Hockley, and I love you with a strength that renews itself each night. I promise to work for the rest of my life to prove myself worthy of the love you gave me and the faith you had in my mind and my heart.

I love you.