A Prisoner's Despair
[This letter is dated 1/7/02, but Bee didn't send it because he felt it was too dark and too self-pitying. It took much urging on our part to get him to send us this letter and another one, probably written in February, 2002. We finally received both letters on 4/13/02.]
Dear Jim & Bob,
I really don’t know if I’m writing to you both or to myself, but I know I need to talk to someone. I know I should be happy. At least that’s what people are telling me. Because I have people helping me now, whereas before I had nothing.
I’m not happy and to be totally truthful I feel no closer to the door today than I did a few years back and the time I’m doing is getting harder and harder to do. You would think after 17-18 years it would be easier to do, but that is not the truth. The time seems to have gotten harder to do.
I find it hard to get up and deal with the everyday bullshit of the Treatment Center. I wish I could turn back time, because I would turn back to the times when I was a little child and the only thing that worried me was the dark and then all it would take was for my mother to come in and chase the bad away.
It is sad, and I still ask myself, Why has this happened to me? Why, if there were a God, would he punish me this way? How much can one man take? How much can one man endure? How many more tests do I have to go through before this nightmare which is my life is over with?
The sad thing is that I don’t know any of these answers, and when I look to others for the answers, they don’t know, or they say something that makes no sense to me, or does but seems too simple to describe what I’ve been going through.
I know that I’m a strong person, but the truth is I’m really such a weak child who has been forced to grow up in a very cruel world, crueler than anyone in the outside world can ever imagine. How am I supposed to understand any of this? My life is so empty and I can never let my guard down because as soon as you do, you have a creature that tries to sneak in on you and disrupt the little world you have created for your self. I’m so brave for all to see, but yet inside I’m so scared, so unsure of everything and (the truth is) almost everyone.
I try not to be and at times I’m good at fooling myself but the truth is I’m scared that I’m never going to go home, that I’ll never make it out of here alive, not to mention the way this whole experience has changed me. I will never again be me for all that has been done to me, for all the ugly has killed the innocence in me. I’m scared of so many things and I’m scared to tell them all to you and to myself, maybe because I don’t know how, or maybe it’s because I always have to be so protective of the inside of the outer me. There is so much that goes on inside of me. The outside is just fine, but the inside is a mess, rotting from the inside out you could say, and I can’t seem to stop it. I guess the best I know how to do is slow it down, or maybe it just seems like I’m slowing it down when in reality all I’m doing is ignoring it.
I really don’t know. I have so much inside me and there is so much I don’t understand. How can it be that only a few will stand up for me when it’s so easy to see that I’m innocent of the crimes that I have been accused of? Would only a few jump in the water if they saw me drowning? I’m drowning, just to let you know, just in case you can’t see I have only a little air left inside me. *B* 1-7-02.
[Bee's letter was done on a word processor. But he added the following note in pen.]
I need to be loved and I can’t find a hand to hold mine with the same tightness.