Wow, life really is full of surprises! I found Palma on Facebook! Having been running my old journals through Grammarly, I got to reading about those times in 2000 and was missing her. But how could I find someone with just a first initial J and a common last name? Multiple variations of keyword searches brought me nothing. I’ve actually made a few attempts over the years. I went with the first names that would come to mind… Juanita, Juana, Janessa, Janelle, Jada…

Then it hit me like a bell in the night that the first two initials on her nametag were actually JM and not JA. So I ran the name JM Palma on Zabasearch and came up with three possibilities. Kind of surprised by what her first name is. It’s also kind of ugly.

Anyway, I thought there was an uncanny resemblance as soon as I saw her picture. Given the passage of 17 years and the fact that they had to wear their hair up and different lighting/angles of the pics, some of her pics made me wonder at first. Otherwise, there was the same curly frizzy hair, the dark eyes with lashes that sort of shot straight out rather than curled upward, the perfectly tweezed eyebrows that formed a perfect arc, the same nose and lips I remembered as well as teeth so perfect that she probably had braces, assuming they’re real, and I think they are.

She moved from Glendale where she’s from to Goodyear, Arizona and is now married to a white guy with four kids. She was single with one kid when I knew her, and I think she’s about five years younger than me. Most of her posts seem to be about old shows/items, God, and support of diversity, even gays. Hardly any political posts, so that’s nice.

She worked at the MVD before becoming a detention officer from 2000 to 2004. Now she’s working at some nuclear energy generating power plant. She doesn’t list her time as a DO and has no work history for those years listed so obviously she doesn’t want just anyone to know about it. Maybe her temper got her fired? A lot of people in law enforcement don’t do it their entire lives because it’s so stressful. I checked her friend list and found she has a couple of friends who work in the Department of Corrections, and one of them was S Nottelmann, another DO I remember well. They used to work together quite often in A Tower, so this pretty much confirmed her identity in my mind.

I don’t think Palma had a crush on me as well, but she was definitely my candle in the dark that helped brighten an otherwise super shitty situation and that helped deter my mind from how much I missed Tom, home and the pet rats we had at the time. Other inmates did think she had a crush on me too, but either way, I miss some of the times we would share jokes and stuff like that. The officer some considered a bitch as well as “cool” definitely did seem to favor me but then so did a handful of DOs because they felt bad for me for being there for something I shouldn’t have been jailed for even if I had been totally guilty of those words on paper. You know, as opposed to actual actions? Nonetheless, mutual crush or not, I always admired the officer who could put a smile on my face when I would break into a fit of tears and who let me swear and shout up a storm when I would become frustrated and angry even though she could have easily broken me in half as if I were merely a wishbone if she wanted to.

It’s all pretty exciting to have finally found her! Can’t wait to send her a message even though I don’t expect a reply.