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I landed a janitorial job and started working shifts in the cafeteria,cookingand serving breakfast a couple of times a week.
After accepting the fate handed to me, I’d spent the first two years working toward taking the GED exam, and by the time I was twenty-four, I had passed with flying colors. And once I was done doing that, I spent three years taking some online college courses and got a bachelor’s degree in business. In my downtime—and there was a lot of it—I decided to finally take up something I hadn’t had much time for since I had been a kid—hobbies. I quickly found that when I wasn’t swiping shit from Mom, selling in The Pit, or working my ass to exhaustion, I could devour about four books a week. I genuinely enjoyed running and strength training. I had a knack for carpentry, and gardening was something I found a lot of pride in.
So, all things considered, I was doing okay. I wasn’t making enemies, and I was finding plenty of stuff to pass the time.
But, man, I was fucking lonely.
It was easy to be lonely in prison. And I wasn’t talking about finding someone to chat with during mealtimes or while working whatever job you were assigned to. No, that part was a piece of cake, and if we were talking about casual acquaintances, I had plenty of those, and all of them were just like me. Good-hearted guys who had ended up in shitty situations.
But what I was talking about was, when everyone else was having visitors or weekly phone conversations or receiving regular letters and packages in the mail, I had none. And that honestly blew my mind a little. To know that these guys—and I mean dudes convicted of worse crimes than me—had parents, wives, kids, and friends out there who loved them and cared for them after everything they’ddoneand I had no one. Not a single fucking person. And that sucked. A lot.
So, one day, out of desperation, I took up writing letters to the one person I could think of who I’d never wronged. The only person who I’d truly saved.
I wrote letters to a girl named Rain. A girl with the prettiest, softest brown hair I’d ever seen.
I knew, even when I’d started writing them, that it was stupid. I also knew I’d never sendthemand she’d never read them. But it was cathartic, in a way, to write to this person I’d built up around a girl I had known for all of fifteen minutes. And while I knew what had happened to me—up to this point in my life anyway—I often wondered what had happened to her after I dropped her off at her house.
She’d be twenty-four now.
Where had life taken her after that night? Had she heeded my warning to stay away from those assholes? Had shegottenthe hell out of that town and run far away, just as I’d always dreamed of doing?
Every week, I filled my letters with those questions, my confessions, and the things that had been happening inside the prison walls. The initial struggles. The acceptance. The hard work I put into being the good, decent person I’d always insisted I was. They served as a diary of sorts, and it was better to get it all out and down on the paper than keep it locked inside. Then, I tucked them away beneath my mattress, for nobody to read, ready to face another week of loneliness.
Until, one week, five years into my incarceration, Mom showed up.
***
Mopping the bathroom floor was dirty, disgusting labor, and I was sure it was understandable when I said I didn’t care much for it. But it was quiet work—monotonous and relaxing—and it gave me a lot of time to think. To remember alifeI’d once had and fantasize about the one I probably would never have at all.
I thought about Gramma and Grampa. How disappointed they might’ve been to see where I’d been living all these years and thethingsI’d done to put me there. But sometimes, I thought,Youknow what? Maybe they wouldn’t beall thatdisappointedafter all.Maybe they’d even be proud of me. Not for the things I’d done—of course not—but for what I’d done since I had gotten there.
I thought about Billy’s mom and the grief and pain she lived with every day. The broken heart I’d single-handedly stuffed inside her aching chest. Every now and then, I considered the possibility that,Hey, maybe she doesn’t hate me as much today as she did yesterday, and that pipe dream filled me with the smallest amount of hope. But the reality was, I knew she wouldn’t ever care about me again. Not until the day I was also dead.
But mostly, I thought about Billy. Where he had gone wrong and how he was also to blame for the choices he’d made in his life.
And, no, I couldn’t say I was mad at him, even given the situation I was in because—let’s be real—I would’ve ended up behind bars eventually,whether or nothe had died. But I was sad. Sad he wasn’t still around. Sad that my friend was gone. Sad that he’d swallowed that damn pill, laced with enough fentanyl to kill three men. Sad that there hadn’t been anything I could do to save him.
I was sad about Billy a lot, and as I scrubbed the bathroom floor, I tried to imagine what he’d look like now. Six years older than twenty-one, maybe with a little more hair on his face and a little more bulk on his body.
Probably not, I thought as I stared into the murky water in the bucket.He was always a scrawny fuck.
“Soldier.”
I looked up to see Harry, the only prison guard who called me by my first name, standing in the doorway. I pushed Billy out of my mind and smiled at the older man in the silver-framed glasses I liked to consider my friend.
“Hey, Harry. How’s it going?”
He returned the smile and walked casually into thebathroom,his hands stuffed into his pants pockets. “Ah, can’t complain. The wife and I went to visit our daughter over the weekend. It was nice to see her. Been a little while.”
“Good for you guys,” I replied, leaning my weight against the mop handle.
“Yeah, we had a good time.” He nodded, meeting my gaze. His eyes twinkled, and he reminded me of my grandfather. There was just something about him. Familiar and comfortable. “Hey, so, listen, you have a visitor today.”
My smile was quick to turn into a frown. “A visitor?”
The words felt strange in my mouth. Nobody visited me. I hadn’t seen a person from my life outside of this place since my sentencing, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine who’dwannasee me now after all this time.
Harry nodded with the same suspicion in his eyes, seeming to read my mind. “Yeah. Someone named Diane.”
