I came home yesterday to find a Valentine’s Day card in my mail box. It was a surprise. I didn’t expect it. I had already received a few cards from my best friend and other loved ones on Tuesday. Those were welcome and heartwarming of course but this one well…

There is a boy I knew a long time ago. That boy is now a man. He did a very bad thing. He paid a steep price. He spent his formative years behind bars. And I wasn’t sure if he would survive those years.

I wrote him many letters. They were filled with hope in the unseen and with love. I received many letters. They were filled with rage, desperation, fear, hope, anger, joy, desperation, rage, boredom, fear, hope, and love.

“I’m suffocating here, Ms. K,” he would write. “I’m going to die here.”

He didn’t die there. The card that I received yesterday attests to that. He was my student in the 11th grade and then I was sitting across from him in Rikers Island barely able to see his face because my eyes were filled to the brim with tears. I was despairing.

I have to be honest, I sometimes thought that he might end up entombed in the concrete of a NY prison cell. I wasn’t sure if he would make it through. I just kept on writing those letters and reading the ones he sent to me.

Now 18 years later, I am standing in my hallway reading a card and my eyes are once again filled to the brim with tears. I am overjoyed.

Inside the Valentine’s Day card is a poem that I recognize, written in my own hand. It is a poem I sent him years earlier. It has been returned to me with a note scribbled in the margin: “You were right…I can breathe again.”