For Mellory

I never met you, Mellory, but we would have recognised something in each other.

The mark of the street.

We have each been a person of the night: pale, restless, empty, yearning.

Busted and messed up and so very full of nameless pain.

The papers and message boards are full of angry takes on your story, penned with such viciousness, some of them, that the page bleeds.

The kind of viciousness that set your feet on the path that sadly, inevitably wended its dark and nasty way to the Avon river, and your senseless, brutal death.

You are to blame, they say, for your fate. You had faults, you committed crimes, you hurt people. At 15, when you entered the sex trade you were OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER!

This Christmas, there is no scoring or whoring for you. It's over, perhaps for the first time in years, and to celebrate your freedom from it I offer for you a prayer of peace and love and comfort.

May the God who sent love down at Christmas extend his great grace and mercy to you, Mellory.
May you rest in his peace.

Meantime those of us who lived long enough to leave the streets, and those who never felt that dark lure, the need or the compulsion, let's tuck our kids in tight, let's be glad for what we have, and let's stop casting stones at the vulnerable, the broken and the dead.