it’s like a heartbeat, but isn’t

I was working for a local political campaign that day.  It was hot and summery, even thought it was a mid-Autumn day.  We carried water bottles in our backpacks - they were cold when we packed them, but warm by the time we got around to drinking them.   The candidate was a local one running for the House, standing on a platform that mainly rose out of energy issues - he was a clean energy tycoon that had just sold his startup for hundreds of millions.  He was made of money, and you could see it in every inch of his operation. - everything was of the highest quality, with a campaign run like a well-oiled machine.  He was a few points ahead in the polls, but he worked like he was a few points down.  This man would get somewhere, I told myself.

Me and a few friends were walking from house to house trying to spread word about this candidate - whether it was through light, conversation, handing them a pamphlet, or even getting the door slammed on our face once they heard we were democrats.   Split up into pairs, i was with a freshman named Wonjeeko.  She was nice, excited, but weary.  You could tell the world hadn’t broken her in yet.  There was a certain grounded lightness in her voice that took you by surprise when she spoke with passion, as she often did.

We had been to maybe a hundred houses before we arrived on the doorstep of our next house.  It was a large house, with red bricks and looming glass windows littered against the walls.  Even though it was a few days past halloween, the decorations were still up - cotton balls, unrolled and stretched into spiderwebs in the corners, plastic pumpkins lit up along the walkway, and ghosts made of plastic bags hanging from the tree in the front yard.  A McCain - Palin poster stabbed into the perfectly green ground.

We knocked on the door, and after a few seconds, a tall, slender woman, probably in her late twenties, answered the door. She was beautiful alright, and her eyes were piercing. I remember thinking her shiny hair was odd - it had that unique black color on it, that made it seem almost blue.  She had immediately made it clear, that she was a Republican, and couldn’t vote for a Democrat.  We nodded and gave our usual lines, paving our way through the conversation, being careful to not offend, or bring upon an arguement.  She was well-spoken and well-versed in her issues, but we were making legitimate progress - she heard our stances and explanations and liked them.  It had been five minutes of going over the major policies regarding the wars, the economy, and energy, before we stumbled upon on her defining issue - abortion.

We had begun to tell her, how our candidate was Pro-Choice, and what he favored as far as birth control, and sex education policies, when we noticed she had begun to tense up a bit.  Looking over her corner, glancing at her kids making noise in the living room, she stepped out of her house with her bare feet, and closed the door behind her, and motioned for us to walk with her as she walked along the stretch of lit up pumpkins.

After a few moments she interrupted Wonjeeko and began to cry and recount her story to us - the kind of story that defines you for a lifetime.  She was about our age, young, alive and livin’ large in college, she was in a sorority and popular, whatever that word meant, anyway.  She had a boyfriend at the time, and she and him had been unsafe - leading to what that usually leads to - pregnancy.  She wanted to keep the baby, yet her parents would take no part of it, and threatened to disown her, because of the shame, and her boyfriend had completely dissappeared within mere days.   Alone, afraid of having alienated her parents permanantly, lost, with no support, and having lost what she thought was the love of her life, she got an abortion.

She said it had been 10 years since she had the abortion, and she had regretted it everyday since then - she had let the pressure of that stupid boy, and her selfish parents make a decision for her, and she paid for it now.  She couldn’t have kids anymore, for whatever reason, and now had adopted two.  Her eyes were dry now, but began to get wet again, as she said “Ten years later and i’m still alone.”

She turned back to her house, and said, “Thanks for coming, but I won’t be voting for him.  I’m sorry.”  We stared at eachother for a few moments, as those words has rung in our head, like they do right now again.

“Ten years later, and I’m still alone.”