April 12 2018
April 12 2018
I’m getting out soon, after doing 8 ½ years. That’s 442 weeks; or 3,100 days; or 74,400 hours; or 4,464,000 minutes.
But who’s counting?
I don’t know how I feel about getting out. It doesn’t feel real. It’s like how you know that one day you’ll die, but the idea is vague and distant, not really a part of life (Plus, you have that secret belief that you’ll somehow live forever and that keeps the fear of it at bay). It’s something like that. I know I’ll get out soon, but I refuse to buy into the idea too much. A part of me is afraid they’ll decide to keep me here forever. I’ll be at the gate, about to walk out, and they’ll shut it in my face. And then laugh at me, at how stupid I am for ever thinking I would have a life outside these bars. I remember the last time I got excited about getting out and how absolutely soul crushing it can be.
It happened about four years ago when my ex-girlfriend wrote me a letter. She wrote to tell me how much she missed me and how she had just broke up with her boyfriend and how when she was with him she kept thinking of me and how generally awesome I am. So, of course, I told her she’s my soul mate. She said I was hers. We began to make plans for when I get out. I would lay in my bed, lost in fantasies of future days; of backyard barbeques, so I read books on start-ups and began writing a business plan. I started having literary ambitions and submitted my writing to magazines in hopes of getting published. I saw my future self as this successful guy who has overcome adversity –– a guy who wears a suit, but not a tie, and he doesn’t bother buttoning the collar because he doesn’t take himself so seriously. A man who has risen from the ashes of his mistakes and has been reborn as an influential voice of perseverance and hope. And all the while she is there by my side, shining in the golden glow of my glory (I found that a side-effect of staring at the ceiling of my cell is that it induces delusions of grandeur).
Then her letters came further and further apart. Also, I realized that without access to a phone or computer doing market research on a business plan is impossible. A growing mountain of rejection slips let me know that either, A: Publishers don’t take handwritten submissions seriously, or B: I have no writing talent whatsoever. All my ambitions began to crumble in my fingers, and I watched as the debris rained to the floor. After about six months, her letters stopped altogether.
And then it hit me.
I still had four years to go. Four more years of this barren, beaten dirt and rusted steel; of chain link and razor wire; of sausage turds for breakfast, pink slime meatloaf for lunch and bologna sandwiches for dinner. Four more years of hair-trigger violence; of degrading strip searches; of thwarted ambition and impotent dreams. Four more years of being alone; of isolation and separation, where the most intimate interaction I can hope for is a fist fight. Four more years of wasting away while everyone I love moves on with their lives, and I become just a quaint memory slowly fading into obscurity. Four more years.
It was spirit-grinding, hope-smashing, apathy-inducing realization. I vowed to never let it happen again.
Now I have less than a year left but it might as well be ten. I learned my lesson. That’s how you survive doing time. You manage expectation by not expecting. You protect hope by not hoping, by keeping it a seed and never letting it germinate. You don’t do the years. You don’t do the weeks. You don’t do the days. You do each moment into the next. And you keep that seed safe for better soil.
I’m getting out soon, after doing 8 ½ years. That’s 442 weeks; or 3,100 days; or 74,400 hours; or 4,464,000 minutes.
But who’s counting?
I don’t know how I feel about getting out. It doesn’t feel real. It’s like how you know that one day you’ll die, but the idea is vague and distant, not really a part of life (Plus, you have that secret belief that you’ll somehow live forever and that keeps the fear of it at bay). It’s something like that. I know I’ll get out soon, but I refuse to buy into the idea too much. A part of me is afraid they’ll decide to keep me here forever. I’ll be at the gate, about to walk out, and they’ll shut it in my face. And then laugh at me, at how stupid I am for ever thinking I would have a life outside these bars. I remember the last time I got excited about getting out and how absolutely soul crushing it can be.
It happened about four years ago when my ex-girlfriend wrote me a letter. She wrote to tell me how much she missed me and how she had just broke up with her boyfriend and how when she was with him she kept thinking of me and how generally awesome I am. So, of course, I told her she’s my soul mate. She said I was hers. We began to make plans for when I get out. I would lay in my bed, lost in fantasies of future days; of backyard barbeques, so I read books on start-ups and began writing a business plan. I started having literary ambitions and submitted my writing to magazines in hopes of getting published. I saw my future self as this successful guy who has overcome adversity –– a guy who wears a suit, but not a tie, and he doesn’t bother buttoning the collar because he doesn’t take himself so seriously. A man who has risen from the ashes of his mistakes and has been reborn as an influential voice of perseverance and hope. And all the while she is there by my side, shining in the golden glow of my glory (I found that a side-effect of staring at the ceiling of my cell is that it induces delusions of grandeur).
Then her letters came further and further apart. Also, I realized that without access to a phone or computer doing market research on a business plan is impossible. A growing mountain of rejection slips let me know that either, A: Publishers don’t take handwritten submissions seriously, or B: I have no writing talent whatsoever. All my ambitions began to crumble in my fingers, and I watched as the debris rained to the floor. After about six months, her letters stopped altogether.
And then it hit me.
I still had four years to go. Four more years of this barren, beaten dirt and rusted steel; of chain link and razor wire; of sausage turds for breakfast, pink slime meatloaf for lunch and bologna sandwiches for dinner. Four more years of hair-trigger violence; of degrading strip searches; of thwarted ambition and impotent dreams. Four more years of being alone; of isolation and separation, where the most intimate interaction I can hope for is a fist fight. Four more years of wasting away while everyone I love moves on with their lives, and I become just a quaint memory slowly fading into obscurity. Four more years.
It was spirit-grinding, hope-smashing, apathy-inducing realization. I vowed to never let it happen again.
Now I have less than a year left but it might as well be ten. I learned my lesson. That’s how you survive doing time. You manage expectation by not expecting. You protect hope by not hoping, by keeping it a seed and never letting it germinate. You don’t do the years. You don’t do the weeks. You don’t do the days. You do each moment into the next. And you keep that seed safe for better soil.
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