My Life By Tens

At the fragile age of four, life’s patterns were already etched in a perplexing dichotomy. My existence was a pendulum swung with unnerving regularity between the dissolute confines of my parents’ urban dwelling — where the air was thick with the stench of failed ambitions and liquor — and the serene expanse of my grandparents’ apple orchard. In this sanctuary, the soil held promises, and the seasons dictated the rhythm of life. There, amidst the ghetto’s desolation and the farm’s bucolic reprieve, I was an enigma, a puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit. My aunt’s assessment — ‘bugger of a kid’ — was a label affixed without consent, its meaning elusive, yet its shadow long.

The adolescent chapter, at the age of fourteen, saw me cast into the gray, unyielding walls of a reformatory, a repository for the misunderstood and the overlooked, where the title ‘bugger of a kid’ seemed to be both an indictment and a prophecy. My rescue was executed by yet another aunt, whose intentions, though perhaps noble, were executed with a heavy hand that left me smarting under the yoke of humiliation. So, it was with a heart weighed down by disillusionment that I chose the devil I knew, returning to the reformatory — my sanctuary of sorts.

Twenty-four brought a storm of change, a relentless downpour of events that would shape the contours of my soul: the searing pain of relinquishing my child of rape to the cold arms of forced adoption, the ephemeral joy of a marriage that slipped through my fingers like sand, ending in separation, and the tentative steps toward higher…