Fourteen

I am in that surreal state, I feel sort of floaty and detached when I look at the heaps of soil and clay piled up away from the trenches that have been dug around the house. Putting in weeping tile is the right thing to do, as evidenced by the standing water that we found in the bottom of one of the excavations yesterday.

Obie phoned yesterday.

He sounded ...rough.

"Where are you?" I asked and quickly amended it with "if you can tell me."

He named a place that I a familiar with because a relative worked with that agency for a number of years.

My heart sank.
Funny I didn't think it could have gone any lower.

Did I mention that the motel that the government had put him in originally was a John motel?
Yeah, I know I did.

From what Birth Grandma told me, Obie had been taken under the wing of one of the young prostitutes who lived there and she turned him onto a supplier of, well, harder substances, and that was the beginning of this particular descent into Hell.

I can speculate about what that ride down looked like.
I don't want to go there though.

Fourteen.

I want to save him.

I KNOW. Okay?
I do know that I can't.
That it isn't about me and that I have to focus on the children that I have at home and everything else that is sane and intelligent.

But I want to anyway even when I know that it isn't up to me.

Just so you know.

But I want to make it easier for him and kids like him not to be victimized by their own governments.

That much I can do.
That much is up to me.
It is up to all of us.

Fourteen.