Something Like Beautiful Read Free

longing for real romance, real love. I stood before crowds and said as much in poems I shared because I was certain that what resided inside the muscle that guided the poems could perhaps be a salve, could be a force that could conjure a great, wide, and wonderful life if only I and just one other were willing to embrace it.
    And I was willing, which is why when the life of love and romance showed up, even as it did inside a place that pulsed with death, I did not question it. I did not question Rashid, not to the extent one might have expected. Rashid, the man, the student, Rashid the optimist, was also a prisoner, and while in the eyes of many that could be his only title, it never was for me.
    Nine years before I met Rashid, he had been sentenced to twenty years to life for his role in a gangland type of murder. He had been a member of a small group of men who shot and killed a man who the group believed was stealing from them.
    When I met Rashid, I did not know this. I knew only that he was bright, handsome, always seeking ways to educate himself, ways to transform. We became friends, not just Rashid and I, but all of my classmates who traveled up to that prison with me that first time and all those times after. They, like me, were moved by these men whom society would have us throw away. But our little group believed that no one was disposable, and so they, like me, read poems and had long discussions about the future with the men who were there. And we came to care for some of the men we met and spoke with. And we came to care for Rashid. In this way, he became part of our little clique. Which is why we kept going, why we kept having those talks, reading our poems.
    Poetry and words can transform a soul, a person. I believed that then and I believe it now. They had done so for me and I was watching them do so for Rashid, who already had a voracious reading appetite. The longer I knew Rashid, the more I believed in him, and then one day, about a year after we’d met, he called me.
    I had given Rashid my phone number after one of the poets in our group read a poem aloud that provoked the guards and we were put out of the prison. I told Rashid to call me when he could so that I knew he and all the other men did not get in trouble for any of our actions. A week, maybe two weeks later, he rang me and said that, no there had been no more problems with the guards, but yes he was reaching out anyway because he wanted me to come visit him. And he was very specific. He did not want to see me as a volunteer or as a poet, but as a friend. I hesitated. I said no. I rebuffed the request several times over. But finally I gave in. The truth was, I liked him.
    The first time I visited Rashid in a personal rather than a professional capacity, it was the day after Christmas. This was when he told me everything about his crime. He brought down the transcripts and he encouraged me to read them carefully. He wanted me to know who he had been so I could trust who he had become, who he was still trying to become.
    He spoke to me of his shame, and he spoke to me of his desire to do better, to be better. He showed me pictures of his son, born when Rashid was eighteen years old and, as it turned out, would be headed to prison less than two months later. At the end of the visit, we kissed, perhaps a little awkwardly, but certainly intimately. It was a kiss that began a romance.
    For five years we courted. We wrote letters, two and three times a week. We spoke on the phone weekly at first, but later, daily. We did our best to shed our fears about vulnerability and trust, and as much as two people can do this, we revealed ourselves to ourselves wholly and without arrogance.
    Rashid would be the first person with whom I discussed in depth the molestations that punctured my childhood, that sent me reeling headlong into the world as a girl who by twelve, had no sense of my own youth, and certainly no sense of my own value.
    I told him that despite