I met my boyfriend on the first day of March, 1997. He was the greatest I’d ever met and soon became the biggest influence on my life. He had moved to Carthage from the small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana in October of 1996, or so I thought. And since he was new in town, I thought it would be nice to show him around and get to know him at the same time. The night I met William I quickly fell in love with him. He had the most gorgeous eyes and the greatest personality. He was the rich mature type that smoked his Marlboro Reds with ease and drank his Miller Lites with style. He drove his ‘97 Camaro with class but never gave the impression that he had money, and lots of it.

William was twenty-one years old, lived with his mom and had everything that he ever wanted or needed. He didn’t work so he traveled a lot and I never knew why. When he was at home, we were always together and everything seemed to be great. We were one couple who never got tired of each other no matter how much time we spent together. There were many nights that we would talk for hours about our lives, our dreams and our goals. We soon discovered that we had so much in common and our outlook on life was the same. We fought life’s battles with a strong fist and learned from each other’s mistakes. We taught each other a lot about life – how it is, how it could be and how it should be.

About a month into our relationship William put his trust in me and started telling me stories about his childhood and teenage years. I was amazed at how different our childhoods were. He fought his way through life while mine was peaceful and full of joy. During his teenage years his life only got worse. When he was fifteen years old he stabbed a fellow classmate with a screwdriver in welding class. Luckily the student was alright and no charges were ever filed. As our conversation deepened, he finally confessed that drugs had become a big part of his life around the age of fourteen. He was so far into drugs that his life depended on them but four months after his seventeenth birthday he went into withdrawal and was put in lock-down rehabilitation all while serving a four year sentence in the Parchment Penitentiary. The Penitentiary – that was another mistake that drugs played a major role in. In October 1992 he was arrested and charged with accessory to robbery and attempted kidnapping. He stayed in jail until October 1996 and that’s when he moved to Carthage with his mom and step-dad. After he was released, he tried so hard to change his life but he finally decided that life had nothing good to offer him. William soon returned to his ‘rebel’ ways but no matter what he still proved to me how much he loved me and cared about my ‘good girl’ life. After almost a year into our relationship, when we finally knew everything there was to know about each other, I discovered he was back on drugs again. This time he wasn’t just using marijuana though, he was sniffing crystal meth on a day to day basis and shooting cocaine on different occasions. Again his life had become dependent on drugs that he would drive twelve hours to spend a thousand dollars on the drugs his body requested.