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It Wasn’t Until I Learned He Was a Serial Killer That I Finally Remembered
“That’s probably why you’re still alive”
The black cab whizzes down the gothic streets of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2016. Ewan’s fingers roll over words and symbols as if they hold actual form, thumb, and forefinger pressing together occasionally for emphasis. I can’t hear what he actually says, the sounds lyrical, his voice reminding me of when I was fourteen, a child like my child now, though I didn’t know it at the time.
I was an adult-child back then. Men treated me like one, used my body like one, molded my mind into one. Forced me to become one.
Though I am visiting him in Edinburgh, where I was born and once lived, Ewan and I were friends when I was fourteen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and this is the topic of his words right now, in the cab on the way to the airport.
It’s decades later and we’re both actual adults, I’m living and teaching in Nigeria with a child of my own.
The topic is the most gruesome thing, though it should be light as a feather since Ewan and I were friends during the time he talks of. There was joy in that time in Santa Fe, when we were young and surrounded in this kind of hippie, kind of punk rock, kind of new-age community. My girlfriends and I were all between…
