Marriage came when I was still clawing my way through the wreckage.
I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t ready for it.
But when it came—when she came—I didn’t turn away.
After years of shame, after a justice system that had labeled me something I never was, I had almost no sense of worth left. I was no longer sure I even deserved love. And yet, when Elnaz—Elee—entered my life, something stirred.
She didn’t just see me. She believed me.
And that changed everything.
A Hypothetical That Became Real
We first connected through poetry.
Elee had been submitting to Word Salad, the poetry magazine I ran with Jean Arthur Jones. Her writing caught my attention—vivid, honest, intelligent. I admired her from afar, never expecting anything real to come from it.
One night, I asked her, “Would you ever marry someone like me?”
It wasn’t a proposal. It wasn’t serious. It was hypothetical.
She was in Iran. I was in the U.S. There were oceans, borders, and eight time zones between us. But in her culture, dating didn’t exist the way it does here. A question like that carried weight. A woman didn’t leave Iran unless it was for marriage.
And she took my question literally.
And I didn’t stop her.
Because deep down, I needed to believe that someone could want me—even knowing the truth about my past.
I told her about the false conviction. The injustice. The years of being treated like something less than human.
She believed me.
She didn’t ask me to prove anything.
She just said yes.
Across Oceans for Love
We built a relationship through late-night video calls and early morning chats. I let myself believe we had “match points,” moments of harmony that could hold a marriage together. We had never met in person, never stood side by side. But still, we talked of marriage.
The only place we could both legally enter was Turkey. So we flew to Ankara and got married.
Looking back, I don’t know if I believed in love or if I just needed to believe in something again. But it felt like a second chance. I should not have needed a second choice because I never did anything wrong. I felt hope and believed it was love. Yet we were going to get marrried when we met each other for the first time.
And then I came home to a message that shattered everything.
Grief That Undid Me
Just days after the wedding, I logged onto Facebook and saw the message: Thomas was gone.
A sudden heart attack. Forty-six years old. My best friend for decades.
I had just seen him before I left. He had smiled and told me, “You’re a lucky man.” I wanted Elee to meet him properly, to know the one person who had remained steady in my life.
We had reconnected like no time had passed—no awkward silences, no judgment, just friendship that endured.
Now he was gone. And I didn’t know how to bear it.
I drank that night—not to celebrate, but to escape the excuciating pain of discovering that my dear friend was actually dead. I drank too much. So much that I couldn’t get on the bus to his funeral. My body rebelled with nausea and shame.
I missed his funeral. I missed saying goodbye.
And I’ve never stopped regretting that. It wasn’t the kind of shame that rose out of my fragile abilty to cope with this loss.
This time, the shame was mine. Self-inflicted. Earned. But it still hurt just as much.
This was a turning point for me. The shelter of Wilmington was fading. Jean Arthur Jones would fade out of my life leaving me with no connections. Just memories of connections to that place. Elee would later think I wanted to go there to remember Lynn. In reality, it was much more complicated. As I stated earlier. Wilmington itself had taken on a sense of being an anchor to a better life before loss and injustice. A safe haven without judgment. Yet, I needed people down there who still knew me.
That was basically gone with the passing of Thomas.
Marriage Meets Reality
When Elee finally got her visa, we were hopeful. But reality doesn’t bend to hope.
She had just graduated medical school in Iran and dreamed of becoming a doctor in the U.S. But the path was steep. She would have to pass the USMLE—in English—and she had never lived in an English-speaking country. People who come from other countries where they studied medicine have to take these exams.
I was on Social Security Disability, scraping by on unstable contract work at Measurement, Inc. It was enough to sponsor her visa, but not enough to build a life on. It wasn’t stable employment.
I warned her: “I don’t have much. I’m on disability. I don’t have much.”
She said it didn’t matter. But it did.
Unspoken Resentments
She studied constantly but never took the exam. I encouraged her gently, but encouragement began to sound like pressure. Years passed. She withdrew. I felt invisible.
We lived in the same apartment, but it never felt like we shared a life. Disagreements weren’t resolved; they were buried. And silence became a third presence in our home.
She had expected a provider. I had a therapist and we talked about how she should have known that I had almost nothing and was living on disability. I had expected understanding.
We both found something else.
In 2018, she left.
I didn’t fight her.
There was nothing left to fight for.
Breadcrumbs and Gaslight
After she left, I turned to the only people I had left—my parents. To be honest, I had been reaching out to them for some time. They had reinforced in so many little ways the fact that they saw me as a failure in life. Someone who would be dependent on others to survive.
I had never asked them for help as an adult. But that had changed when tragedy struck a decade before our marriage in 2010. Sometimes I was genuinely worried about how I would pay the rent and not get evicted or pay the electric bill. They gave just enough to keep me from falling, but never enough to help me rise. A part of me had felt that they owed me support because if they had not watched with indifference as my suffering was beyond words could convey… if they had done anything when I was in jail, needing a lawyer and a real chance to live, then I wouldn’t be in this situation.
“You need us,” they said. “You can’t survive without us.”
And then at other times: “You should be ashamed of needing help.”
It might not have occured in one single conversation but over the decades that was what I was hearing.
It was a double-bind—emotional gaslighting dressed as charity.
I had already been labeled disabled. Already endured injustice. Already lost my career, my home, my freedom. And now, even asking for help became another source of shame.
Not guilt. Not regret.
But toxic shame—the kind that whispers you are the problem and that you’ll never be enough. If so much evil was allowed to triumph over me then there must be something cursed about my being. Like I was never meant to rise from the past in the first place.