Read Online ( 2011) Cry For Justice by Ralph Zeta - Free Book Online

highly trained interrogator. But to me, whatever hell she was silently enduring, was just too obvious to be contrived. It emanated from her every pore, from her entire being and that day, while experiencing my own version of hell, I came to crave Nora.
    Some would say that we were lucky to have met when we did. I soon learned that shared misery also makes for a potent aphrodisiac. The attraction we both felt was as predictable as it was instantaneous, like two wildfires merging. That very evening, I went to her office and waited just outside. When she saw me, I saw wonder and even a glimpse of joy in her round, freckled face or maybe it was relief? We spent the night together. We clawed at each other as though clinging on to life itself, as if we might capture or possess something that could not be contained, like catching rain with bare hands. The way life works sometimes amazes me. At the most appropriate of moments, when we feel like we are past bottom and there is no end in sight, Lady Fate flicks its unpredictable wand and just like that, that which we seem to require the most, crosses our path. Maybe we weren’t forever, but for now we were important in each other’s life. And that was enough for me. I hoped it would be enough for Nora and that it would last.
    I have seen so many so-called “promising marriages” fail, the participants deluding themselves into thinking that a long happy married co-existence is an attainable expectation, as if it was written in the Bill Of Rights, something else, that along with Social Security and Medicare, we are all entitled. In my opinion anyone sane enough to understand human nature could never believe a fallacy such as “happily ever after.” The human condition, with all its imperfections, is just not that easily molded. As we go through life we experience changes not just in appearance, but changes to the very essence of who we are. The rare cases in which happily ever after is attained are just singular instances rare enough to be discounted as outliers, unnatural departures from a predictable outcome, disparate oddities that stand out in a world where chaotic co-existence is the only predictable outcome. Happy married life exists mostly in fictional tales. It is a misleading notion created by authors and Hollywood types. Nothing but make believe. I had seen it first in my parents’ friends and later had the unenviable position of watching my own parents go through that hell themselves. For most of their married life they shared a loneliness that was palpable. The Silent Justice Family. That loneliness was eventually replaced by a bitterness that completely transfigured my parents. Home became a cold, stark place. As my mother’s condition worsened, she withdrew even more. The confrontations became worse. Things improved considerably once my father moved out of the house. It wasn’t long before I moved out.
    To be married is to experience being singularly alone. It seems that most good marriages tend to be those in which each becomes the silent warden of the other’s loneliness. If you went into marriage with your eyes wide open and had reasonable, real-world expectations, that life is at best a never-ending series of compromises in which you relinquished your individuality and personal desires in exchange for a harmonious home life and, if you could withstand that bleak, cold reality for forty or fifty years, or more, then you stood a real chance of having an enduring marriage. For others, the not-so-lucky majority, marriage becomes a life sentence that surely makes some participants relish death’s sweet embrace. It was the trap that caught my parents. It was a trap I will do my best to avoid.
    For now at least, the arrangement with Dr. Burton worked just fine. We were like friends with benefits, only better. I really cared for her, and I was pretty sure she cared for me as much if not more. But was that really love? Who knows? I am certainly no expert far from it,