He wasn’t telling her in order to shock her. He only seemed to be comparing how happy he was now to the difficult times he had faced before. |
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| I have looked at the moon from my prison window when it was painful to look at. I have looked at it when it was such torture to think of the moon shining on all that I had lost that I beat my head against my cell walls. | |
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| I have looked at the moon, speculating thousands of times about the unborn child I was taken from. Wondering if it were alive. Wondering if it had been born alive, or if the poor mother’s shock had killed it.Wondering if it was a daughter who would grow up to be a woman. A daughter who knew nothing of me | |
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| My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child. | |
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| So! But on other moonlit nights, when I have been in a different mood, one like a sad sense of peace, I have imagined that she came to visit me in my cell and took me out of the prison and to freedom. I imagined her praying for me, showing me her children, keeping my story alive. | |
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| I was that child, father. I wasn’t half as good a daughter as that, but I loved you just as much. | |
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