Prologue: College Hill
Everything that anyone said would happen to me when I moved to New York City in 2009, actually happened in College Hill within the first year that I lived there in 2019.
Everything that anyone said would happen to me when I moved to New York City in 2009, actually happened in College Hill within the first year that I lived there in 2019. The darkest of The Dark and the lightest of The Light, displayed blatantly, right there for all to see in front of God and everybody. As though it weren't obvious the fundamental lack of justice and accountability of the Cincinnati community which in truth, justifiably bears the brunt of an evil Mason Dixon Line legacy, winding back from here for 150 years or more. It's not the proud legacy to the Ohio Valley they'd like you to buy into, snaking along the Ohio River. It's more like a noose creeping around the neck of a mythos of past, long-resolved injustices, choking the misty air above the Ohio River.
My arrival was precipitated by four decades of advocacy and innovation around trying to cure the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.
Call it “Needsearch”.
No one who doesn't intimately know the horror of being so conflicted about so many disturbing overtures in a lifetime - from childhood, adolescence, marriage, and motherhood - no matter what anyone claimed, somehow I always seemed to be exposed to the “exceptional” experience of not being able to report and stop sexual abuse, the cover-up, or the money laundering of this heinous crime.
It was so bad for so long, that the truth of the matter is that they won. They broke me, broke my heart, my mind, and maybe even my soul, at least that is how it certainly felt for me.
So when I came here to Cincinnati, I came here to heal from a past so sorrowful and dark I honestly didn't want to survive it. I was just too tired.
I was pissed I'd survived it.
I saw suicide, met my soul mate and lost him, witnessed corruption on a grand scale, witnessed a young man dying in the streets here, ripping the scab off of the depraved indifference of the police force and the white community to the black community, and to the poor. I saw such savagery up close and personally, I saw more domestic violence and torture from three neighbors than I'd ever imagined I would see again in my lifetime. But ironically, because of those very nightmares, I ultimately unidentified an unrestrained serial sexual predator who was playing Gd to the people in his personal and professional lives, narcissistically imagining that he would never ever get caught or exposed.
But he didn't count on me, did he? In retrospect, I’ve got to say it seems as though I was perfectly crafted to be the all-seeing eye behind his crimes. It was completely karmic.
I was dead set on running as far away as I could, as soon as I could. I tried. Happenstance and Covid lockdown conspired to keep me in a town I considered God Forsaken. But for me and mine, I didn't count on the pragmatic and practical nature of real love - and the ironies and nuances that life gives back to heal fifty years of pain and disappointment for myself, and maybe others... or how letting go might create having it all if I can just find the strength to trust what I already know.
Cincinnati makes wickedly hateful people from my observations, so, don't kid yourself it's a nice midwestern town - it's definitely Mean Streets. Nonetheless, I am just going to have to bloom where I’m planted, unless life has a better plan.