Page 73 of Fragments

“Ignore him,” Joy says softly, placing a gentle hand on my back as she deposits me back in my cell.

Once inside, I crash down onto Dash’s bed by his legs, covering my ears with my hands while Ren screams from up the hall.

Yea, right. If only it were that easy.

4 years ago…

One of the many,manysymptoms of being locked away in Alabaster Penitentiary is that you start to forget details about life outside of here. What you used to do, places you used to go.

Familiarity fades. Everything before prison begins to blur, and the one thing that stays clear isthis place.

Such could be true of any prison, but I’m sure it’s worse here. Becausehere,there are absolutely no ties to the outside world. You exist in a bubble of despair; nothing but agonizing boredom as far as the eye can see, which is not very far, I might add.

At least regular prisons allow television, phone calls, visitation… Hell,internet. We don’t even get to go outside.

I’m not kidding. I haven’t seen the sun in almost a year.

So much for my glorious California tan.

This concrete tomb, located on an island conveniently outside of U.S. jurisdiction, is more like a post-apocalyptic wasteland than a prison. Life here is all about survival, the most primal of instincts. We’ve been reduced from human beings to numbered animals.

I’m not a person anymore. I’m inmate #35. And I’ve had to learn to live with that.

I won’t say it comes easily, because it definitely doesn’t. I’ve been here for almost a year, and I still wake up on occasion, expecting to be back in my bedroom.

When I first got here, it was understandably worse. I was just a petrified eighteen-year-old college student, plopped in the middle of a sea of rapists and murderers. My default setting, loner that I am, was to retreat into myself, which is a surefire way to tumble deep into a hole of depression. After all, you have nothing but time to sit around and think. And for me, it was all about how much I took for granted.

My friends, my family, school… my entirelife. I let the good things slip through the cracks when I had them, and now the cracks have all been plastered over.

It’s too late to tell my parents I love them one last time. To watch movies with them, and have dinner… I should have done it when I had the chance, instead of spending all my time online. They’ll never know just how grateful I am for everything they gave me.

Sure, they didn’t get me, and they never really tried. But I also didn’t make an effort to bring them into my world. It’s a two-way street, but we were driving in opposite directions. But despite all that, they alwayslovedme, and that’s the most important thing. Not everybody gets good parents, and knowing I’ll never see mine again had me overflowing with gut-wrenching regret. If we’re being honest, it still does.

I’ve made a few friends here, because talking to the crazies and weirdos is better than talking to yourself—we steer clear of the guys who do that. But still, I missmyfriends every day. Tony and Reno. Cyrus. Leah… It kills me to think that they won’t know why I logged off and never came back. At night, I stare at the blackened concrete ceiling andacheinside, imagining that they’ll assume I never really cared about them.

I’m trapped alone with nothing but criminals and my thoughts. A constant haze ofwhat ifs.

I hatewhat ifs. I’m a man of ones and zeros.Uncertainty makes me itch.

But still, human beings are adaptable. We’re designed to keep ourselves alive, no matter what, which is reallyallI’ve been doing since I got here.The present dominates the past.

This is my life now, and I have no choice but to accept it. Scrape up what little joy is available to me and use it to get by. Otherwise, I’ll go completely nuts.

It happens exactly as often as you’d think.

I spent three days in solitary a few months back for slapping Nieves is the face with a ham sandwich, and man, is itquietdown there.

In my defense, he totally had it coming. He kept trying to steal my juice box. That’s a personal foul evenoutsideof prison.

Solitary definitely sucks. But even worse than that experience were the few days I spent in the East Wing shortly after I arrived. That place is the kind of quiet that feels intentional.

I’m sure every bit of torture that happens down there is on purpose.

The visit consisted of being strapped to a chair and shot up with sodium pentothal—the truth serum—while dudes in white lab coats asked me all kinds of questions about my hacking. I assumed once they got what they wanted out of me, they’d just kill me.

That was when the Warden showed up, and told me I wastoo valuable to destroy.

Trust me, there’s very little comfort in those words.