Forbidden by Abbey Lincoln Page A

given our ages as well as the fact that neither one of us had any control over our lives. It was a lesson taught to one afternoon three weeks before my sixteenth birthday, delivered both swiftly and ruthlessly. 
                  We are not, nor will we ever be, in control of our destiny. I learned that the day Ryan was ripped from my life, taking with him my heart and leaving me with a gaping hole in my chest that no man has since, and I suspect, will ever, be able to fill. 
                  It took some time, but I have succeeded in finding him once again. I had to find him, given all that has happened in the past few months. I had to see him one last time before I began the rest of my life. 
                  Oddly enough, he didn’t stray far from our home town of Springfield. In fact, right now I stand on his doorstep only thirty minutes away from where we both grew up, though I am certain Ryan did the bulk of his growing up during the time he spent in that juvenile detention center.
                  The story of Ryan and his father was something that rocked our small town to its core. It isn’t every day that a teenage boy shoots his father in what appears to be cold blood. Though Ryan never said anything in his defense, he and I both knew he hadn’t shot his father in cold blood. I knew him better than anyone else; we were two parts of the same whole. I knew how tender his hands could be, how gentle he was with my body. It simply wasn’t possible that he could have done something like that without being provoked and feeling like there was no alternative. 
                  Nothing even close to that had ever happened before and I recall with utter clarity how swiftly everyone’s opinion of Ryan was altered. It was as though their emotions were linked to a switch they had no control over. A switch linked to the town paper that told the story of a seventeen year old boy who’d shot his father with a hunting rifle, but didn’t bother to ask what might have driven a polite, respectful, honor student to pull that trigger. It seemed no one wanted to hear Ryan’s side of the story. Perhaps our small town was afraid of discovering something sinister had lived undiscovered beside them.  Perhaps it was much easier to believe that Ryan, a “volatile teenager,” - if you were to believe the local paper -had simply turned on his father, an upstanding member of society. In any event, the crime had been committed and the perpetrator has been sentenced. There was no need to dig any deeper, not that they could have, since the rifle took the life of the only witness to what happened in their small house. 
                  But I never believed a word of it. It was incomprehensible to me that the same hands that were so tender with me could pick up a rifle and kill the only family he had without being provoked. 
                  Needless to say, I was alone on my beliefs.   
                  Ryan never told me much about his relationship with his father, or what had happened the night he took that rifle in his hands. I had my suspicions, of course, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my twenty three years, it’s that the truth is often much more horrific than anything our minds can imagine. 
                  Almost overnight, Ryan had become “that boy,” someone to be feared, instead of the sweet, polite teenager who’d taken care of his father ever since his mother had died of cancer when he was only nine years old. Even my father’s opinion of Ryan had become jaded. He’d forbidden me from ever seeing him again during breakfast one morning over a ham and cheese omelet we shared, something we did every weekend for as long as I can remember.
                  It was also something we never did again. 
                  My father banned me from ever seeing Ryan again as though he were