I was nineteen at the time, just a kid barely out of his teens. The weight of a broken home cursed with violence and trauma had turned me into a wounded street relic, a damaged product. I was shackled with addictions, my blood coursing with the smoke of crack cocaine and the jagged bite of meth amphetamines. Mitigated chaos was the only constant, that and my devotion to my girl, Melissa. She was my love, my heartbeat, my partner in crime… the only person in the world I trusted with a loaded gun.
She drifted back from New Zealand with her old man after a long stretch overseas seeing her missionary uncle off to the big sleep and she was packing a secret that would change both of our worlds. She blindsided me with an unexpected pregnancy, already eight months along and looming like a storm on the horizon. Love is risky business and it had me gripped tighter than a vise; my girlfriend was my beacon in the mist and foolishly I believed we were stitched together by fate, destined for eternity.
In a daze of hope and desperation I succumbed to her wishes, adrift in a tide I never saw coming.. I converted to a foreign faith of a religion I didn’t know, baptized by the man who’d soon become my father-in-law, and I marched like a soldier to the altar, tie askew, three weeks prior to my daughter’s debut into this chaotic world.
There was no postcard moment, no dream unraveling in a cascade of light. Instead, it was a frantic jumble of terror, rushed decisions marred by the sharp edges of fear, the choking grip of shame, and the heavy cloak of guilt. Welcome to my life—a tragedy dressed in a tuxedo, standing at the altar of the American dream, yet so far from its glow. With a single month’s notice I traded my own beliefs for the shackles of her faith and watched as reality played out behind the glamorous curtain and all I could do was keep turning the pages of this improvised script.
My daughter and I have been estranged for half of her life. This wasn’t my choice. Her mother’s family were loaded, her crew was threatening to kill me and raise her for more than a year after our separation and her grandparents lied to me about joint guardianship while Melissa was in the pen. The court documents they handed to me when my daughter was four years old were already signed by a judge and stated that Evelyn’s grandparents were exclusively responsible for her upbringing in the Mormon Church. Despite the conversion, the baptism, the active membership in their church for more than two years and despite being a father present and active in her life as much as I was able before her mother was released from prison, I’ve never received a single phone call nor letter nor any attempt at contact from my daughter...
I named my daughter Evelyn after my Greek Immigrant great grandmother (Εβελίνα, pronounced Ef-tee-hee-oh-ss in Greek).
She was almost two when her mother and I separated, three when her mother was sent to prison and around four and half years of age when I left to Louisiana to help the Hurricane Katrina victims in the 7th Ward. Four years later, while juggling forced, partitioned fatherhood, group stalking and a recurring drug addiction I received a call from Melissa who informed me that our divorce hearing was upcoming and at that hearing the only thing Melissa wanted from me was my last name which she still carries to this day. I wrote and recorded a song for Evelyn when she was three years old and I’ll post it here and now on the off chance that she ever comes across my blog site;