Modern.
The podcast is supported by.
From the New York Times and WBUR Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss and redemption.
I'm your host, Meghna Chakrabarti.
We can't control the curveballs life throws at us, but we can control how we handle them.
Asha Bendelli decided she needed to face the biggest one of her life alone.
Cynthia Adai Robinson, star of the USA series shooter, reads Ashas essay, I need.
To woman up five months after we were married, my husband, Rashid, and I had a honeymoon of sorts, a 44 hours jaunt in a trailer at the New York state prison where he lived.
At 21, he had been convicted of a gang related murder, which occurred three years before, and on this day, he was in the 13th year of a 20 year sentence.
We had met five years earlier, when I was 23, a college student teaching poetry to prisoners.
I believed then, as I do now, that poems can expand a soul.
They had done so for me, and I was watching the same thing happen to prisoners, especially Rashid, already a man seeking transformation.
Over the course of a year, in many discussions about changing ourselves and our world, we fell in love with Rashid.
There was this breath of dialogue I hadn't experienced before.
Our conversations, unspeakably honest, were, for me, life saving.
When I met Rashid, a failed marriage already behind me, no college degree yet no direction for my future.
I saw my life as a series of mistakes.
He set that lie aside, made me see myself through his eyes until I could love my reflection when I could no longer stand not being able to touch this man who had so touched me.
We married in the prison visiting room.