Another selection from A Different Kind of Hell, forthcoming in a second edition from Moonstone Press.
The Wave describes something I experienced repeatedly during incarceration: the sudden, overwhelming return of memories of the life I’d left behind. They arrived without warning, often during the most ordinary moments, and carried with them the recognition of everything I’d lost and the consequences of my own decisions.
THE WAVE
More like a sound wave or another invisible force of bottomless sinking when you’re not even thinking about anything or watching television or eating a meal or gathering your laundry and your lost life just runs like a reel in front of you and you know at least I know that I never took it for granted loving my life in fact milking every minute maybe too much loving the little moments which were always big moments for me and every phase beautiful even when miserable my one gift able to manage the misery by pretense because that’s as good a solution as anything real because there is nothing to really hold other than the searing desire to do almost anything to go back and go back and go back and you never stop going back I don’t care how much you tell yourself you keep going back to the redo’s and the tipping points all so obvious now especially with the children who cannot most likely recover not only from this horrific episode of disgrace and betrayal but from all the other mistakes and failures I perpetrated on them in the name of protecting or avoiding or prevaricating or managing for them what they might have managed better themselves or moving them from place to place because I couldn’t make better decisions or stay in one place and face the music or the challenges and remain in the trenches of the battles I kept creating endlessly as my father said to me always walking into the mud and even as he said it and I was arguing against it I knew he was right but couldn’t stop and just kept on walking deeper into it until I’m now where I am in the deepest part of the mud buried over my head my beautiful wife with me and there is no getting out of it and if and when I get out of here I’ll probably do it again or probably not only because I’m just too broken to harness the energy to re-launch another life and so will just continue to replay the reel of this life wave after wave after debilitating wave.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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