by Keith Erickson, Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, CA
As a child, I never imagined that my favorite place in the world, my world, would be a park bench in a California State Prison. I find the most serene moments being suspended in time, right there adjacent to the inmate soccer field.
It’s a place that I have walked by thousands of times over without as much as a second glance. A place where taking a moment to just sit and relax my legs, would require me pausing for a period of time, disrupting my doing absolutely nothing at all.
Prison life is so fascinating that way. Despite, having all the time in the world, we fear missing out on the fact that needs to be present, in order to survive the seriousness of our circumstance. I guess it takes a man that spends most of his life in prison to see the bittersweetness of a such a thing.
Life, in all its irony, somehow gave me peace where I once refused to stop and simply take a seat. That bench, that place where I now spend at least an hour of my each day, gives me a place in the world that’s no longer defined by what’s around me, rather, all of the things that now make me appreciate life overall.
My perception from the bench is not so much of a secret that few ever discover within these walls, but, more so a place few reach until their journey leads them there. That was me, a man that needed to feel as if he’s lost everything, including sense of self.
Before I wanted to know what it was like to no longer hurt inside. Growing up, the world had swallowed me up before I ever got to experience the good things that most children do. An abusive stepfather addicted to heroin, a mother that kept my brother and me in harm’s way of this man by refusing to leave him. It took from me what should’ve been the best years of my early childhood.
Instead, I’d learned to suppress all that was done to me until it inevitably surfaced in me as an adult. How many other children are out there right now, in this very moment, going through the same affliction I did as a child? On my bench, tucked away in a California Prison, it’s one of the questions that drives me to how to be an exception to the rule. The rule that suggest I live with being victimized rather than surviving.
I didn’t have to spend the majority of my life in prison. Nor did I have to harm myself and others by making the poor choices that I had for so long. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would stop and sit down a lot sooner than I had.
On that bench, in a California Prison where I’m going on my Thirty second year, I finally sad down to rest. I see the world, life, if you will, as something that I still have so much to accept and give back to others, should you one day see that bench unoccupied. I know that it’s not for sure of me having given up. Know that I’ve finally gone home so that the next man whom has been lost and broken as I once was, can discover what I have on that bench and find their own way again as well.
That bench, those moments of serenity, I know in my heart will someday lead me back into the world, where I belong.