July 17, 2018

July 17, 2018

Since the monsoons have started, I make it a point in the evenings to sit outside, as far away from buildings and as close to the prison fences as I can get, and watch the clouds roll over the mountains in the distance. It gives me this powerful feeling. The air is cool and playful, whipping impishly one way and then the other, full of that musty earth smell that precedes a rain, and in the distance the thunderheads darken the sky, towering anvils, all bruised purple and grey except for the tops where the setting sun lights it from behind, a luminous quicksilver outline that hugs the budding curves. Underneath, the mountains stand—stoic silhouettes. I watch this scene and there’s an epic majesty to it. What I imagine is a person who stumbles into a sun-dappled glen and sees a moose might feel. But there’s another quality to it, a feeling that comes from my gut, a calling, a longing, like the mountains in the distance, they’ve always been there, but, now—now that I’m going to be free—they whisper a quiet seduction of adventure, of the unknown, and they are inviting me, as a lover might, to join them in that far off place, where who knows what awesomeness might await. And then the majesty bleeds away as my eyes drop and I see there are still coils of razor wire in my way and there are people behind me that scurry about, caught up in the petty machinations of prison politics, maneuvering and manipulating, grasping for power in an ever shifting hierarchy of pointlessness, seeking their next high or plainly looking at their feet as they walk, completely ignoring the fact that, out there, there are mountains.