I’ve always been someone who feels deeply.
In my experience, I’ve learned that pain is something you either carry with you in waves, or something you escape from. And when you choose to escape, you hide in those dark corners within you. The places where you don’t want to admit or acknowledge even exist. Where no one ever wants to go. Where you hope, or perhaps lie to yourself, that no one notices. No one sees through the mask you portray; sees into your weaknesses, because when that happens, you’re exposed, and pain combined with exposure is unbelievably dark and lonely.
This is what I remember.
How Did I Get Here?
Among the many scars that I have, nothing compares to the self-inflicted wounds. See, we don’t choose when tragedy hits us, but we choose what we do with tragedy, and what we do to ourselves. And I totally self-destructed. I remember being processed into prison. All I had come to be was nothing; complete emptiness on the inside. I moved my body because I had to, almost robotically. This new existence, was unbearably depressing, but I continued to move, because that’s what you do when your still alive. The difference this time, was that I wasn’t numb. I was feeling everything, but I had to keep going; I had to walk where I was told, lift up my arms when I was told, bend over, and cough when I was told. I kept moving, doing what I was supposed to do, following each next step. Feeling and absorbing life inside and around me for the first time, in a very long time.
Life when your high, is completely different from the real world. When you’re high, you just glide through existence; fumbling through the productive part of society. Trying to fit in. Or rather, not trying to fit in; trying so desperately to be different, while ironically trying to be all that you can be. Someone you imagine yourself to be. You feel important, like you can make a difference; but then you remember that all you are trying to do, is get your fix. And this “fix” will fix everything, and you will become all mighty. Then after your fix, you’ll briefly know how to cure the sick, how to mend the torn, how to put together the broken pieces; how to put together your brokenness; how to rise above from it all; all the pain. You forget that its only temporary. You won’t do any of those things. You’ll only run around aimlessly, and accomplish nothing. That is what I did; ran around doing absolutely nothing.
I remember the humility of prison; the literal nakedness, of being processed into a state penitentiary. Where everything is stripped from you; your voice, your will, and even your last shred of dignity is taken; the clothes off your back. Your arms impulsively try to cover your body, begging for some kind of humanity. You quickly realize that, that mercy will never come, and the worse part about it is that you did it to yourself.
No one has compassion here. No one cares. It is all just a game of control and fending for oneself.
This is the place I called upon; I put myself here. No one else did. How could I hate myself so much to inflict this much pain? That was a question that I couldn’t even answer at the time. I didn’t know why. What I did know, was that now, I not only had the pain of what I had become, but also the pain of what I had never dealt with. The pain that I never carried in waves. It all came crashing down on me.
My new name OM4970. This was my new life. And prison, I would learn, is entirely a world of it’s own. A rat race. A “race” race. A whole new world; a complete hell on wheels that has learned to skate through the system, to become a system of function; something that can thrive within the bounds of nothingness. No foreseen future. No tangible accomplishments. Nothing. Yet, it thrived. It thrived on heart-shaped finger drawings. It thrived on kisses to the wind; where kites flew about: notes, waiting to find their destination. That destination being another lost soul to accompany their loneliness. Yes, I was in a maximum security prison. People spend their lives here. So you quickly learn the rules of habitat in living in this new world. And it truly IS another world.
I remember my first night in blues. Blues is the uniform they give you when you’re processed and first come into Muncy. That first night, my cellie (also known to the free-world as, roommate) was crying, and truly having a breakdown. She kept complaining about a migraine, begging the guards to help her. I remember thinking “Shut. The. ‘F’. Up,” as if things weren’t already terrible. We put ourselves here, and although it feels like a black-hole, we didn’t just trip into it, we jumped; pushing on with our reckless lives as long as possible, until getting caught. When you get to a place in your life like prison, what can you truly say, to make it ok. No screaming, or pleas of pity or compassion will help you. We have already said it all; from the broken promises to the net of lies. We are caught. I certainly didn’t have anything to say. There was nothing I could say to make any of it better. I spent that night, and many more, silently suffering in my pain. She suffered loudly, but still alone.
One thought that kept reoccurring in my head was, how did I get here? My dad didn’t raise me this way. I did have some good memories of my childhood. What went wrong? I don’t like to make excuses for anything, but the fact is, that our environment and the people in it, shape us. Indeed, we are all unique and respond to circumstances in many different ways; however, I believe our individual personalities grow or digress based on what we take in around us. I know exactly where I began to digress. It was when my life recreated fictional scenes from the movies; the things you never expect to happen in your own life. Thinking back, after it happened, I envision this fine line that I started playing with; peeking over, taping my foot once… twice…. three times, just enough to tease my insecurities and unresolved guilt. I straddled that line for a very long time. One side still pretending to be responsible, and the other indulging in my dark corners; my temptations; my desire for oblivion and numbness. I know exactly how I got here. My response to tragedy was absolutely tragic.