by Hayden
Today is February 7th, 2018. Every day that passes me by is like a silent scream for help emanating from my heart. I’m counting down the days to an unknown deadline. I don’t know when I will be free.
I feel angry at the system, the prosecutors and judges for keeping me locked up without a warrant or charges. Fighting an impervious system is tiring in so many ways. It reminds me of fighting with my father when I still lived with my family. I’m tired of the constant pain tugging at the essence of my being.
As a child, I had very little to look forward to from day to day. The only spectacular experiences were on holidays. They were the only times that my family would act civil.
Now, that I’m locked up and away from family, I don’t even get to experience holidays like I used to. Even the smell of gingerbread cake at Christmas was enough to suck the life and joy out of me. I just can’t seem to be happy anymore. The years of abuse and loss are constantly dragging me down.
Every time somebody asks me how I’m doing, I fake a smile and put on my happy mask. The system has taken so much out of me. The truth is, I’m doing horribly. I have no parents to tell me they love me. I have no extended family that thinks of me as any more than afterthought. Do you know how hard it is to live life without a single loved one to say they believe in you? It’s driving me insane.
Maybe I’m asking for too much. Maybe I am just damaged goods like my father said. I wonder if it’s wrong to be jealous of people who experience more love than I do. I wonder if it’s wrong to have a desperate desire to be valued. Is it? Please tell me.
Sometimes people ask me how I handle my incarceration so well. To answer this, I probably need to go back to my childhood, before the age of fourteen.
My early childhood on through my early teens was itself a form of imprisonment. Life was a prison in every sense. My father was such a narcissist that I quite literally bled for it. Every sense of individuality and liberty was stolen from me. Leaving my father’s home was one of the best, yet most painful, moves in my life. So, yeah, being incarcerated reminds me of living with my father.