Rambling Thoughts Of A Convict In The Wee Hours

The Unedited, Definitely Not Flowing Or Smooth, Rambling thoughts of A Convict Before He Drifted Off to Sleep In The Wee Hours Of Jan 27, 2020

These days turn into years.

It all happens faster than you'd think. There's this doubled edge to the way time unfolds in here. You hope it speeds by. And in a way it does. But then one day you look up to find you're closer to your release than you are to your arrest. And you realize that if time keeps accelerating, past the shitty times, then, the remaining good times, your last viable years of freedom, will also blow by in the blink of an eye, and before you know it, it will all be over. This one chance will be over before you can even get your feet back under you. Which, in a way, makes you realize that you're already dead.

It'd be one thing if all this happened in your twenties—a true rebound would really feel possible. Doing over a decade in prison, especially in your thirties, makes you feel like this one life, your one chance at building something worth living, the one shot you spent your whole life waiting to get started was botched. It makes you want a redo, a chance to hit the reset button. To get one more chance with all the things you know now. If only this was a practice run.

And then, just before drifting off to bed, you think: what if all this wasn't so you could learn to build a life worth something or to find happiness.

Maybe all of this, the tragedy, the prison, the separation, the loss, and the resurrection was just so you could learn the important lessons you'd otherwise never have come to, had this not happened; maybe this is about finding a way to express all these things before you die. Not for yourself but so someone else could maybe read your words and find the meaning they might not have found otherwise. That maybe all of this pain and struggle was just so you could reach someone else so they didn't have to to through what you went through to learn what you learned. That maybe you had your chance and you blew it. But in that failure you were at least given these twelve precious years in prison to figure it all out—the deepest meaning. Not so you could reap the rewards of this personal revelation, but so you could pass it on to someone with enough life ahead of them to actually use it.

And in this, you come to realize that if this is indeed the case, then maybe it was all worth it ... Or at least it wasn't all worthless.

I need to know some of this means something, that all this pain and struggle isn't for naught. So maybe, if I die in my sleep tonight, it won't be for nothing.