All For More (Or Less)

“Are you back again?”
I suppose so.
“Did they give you anything yet?
I’m not sure. But the voices are louder this time.
“What about the smell?
Of the people you mean?
“That’s when you know it’s real.”

I don’t think I know if anything is real
(anymore)

I suppose the thing about being crazy is you don’t know that you’re crazy. That’s something only a sane man thinks.
The voices you hear are regular and steady.
And of course, here I am, sitting up at night and facing the hard, flat walls of incarceration.
The sounds are familiar and so are the smells from solitary.
I know this place too well.

Here I am, wishing I was somewhere else and of course, I am wishing I was someone else too, or if anything at all; I wish that I was able to rise above myself. I wish I could jettison out of this place as if to levitate above the stress levels or the internal noise pollution, which is what I assume we call the voices in our head.

The walls close in. The surrounding sounds confuse the internal monologue. Is this me? Is this the voices again?
Sanity slips to aggression.
Peace dissolves to distrust and the pecking order in the common food chain causes paranoid stirs, which I admit to because the medication can no longer mask.

It is the wind that blows the trees. It is the sea that wraps the Earth. It is the mind that decays sound and it is the products of our environment that further pushes us to the edge.
I swear this must be the remnants of some kind of chemical exhaustion.
It has to be, right?

I was told that they took another person out on a stretcher last night.
Death by their own hand is what they accused, which is not true to the letter.
But the fact that he died is more true to the heart because there are self-inflicted wounds and there are self-propelled deaths that took someone away in more of a passive approach.
But there is a bullet or a slash wound and there are the incidental deaths that crept up on someone because life was too hard to live.
This case was common.
The needle pushed inward. The plunger shoved downward.
Eyes rolled closed and the lights went off.
That was it.
They found him with foam at the mouth. . .

No one expects this to be their last “pinprick,” but if it is, it is, and if this is the end, —then this is the end and so the mind drifts off, the body falls or lilts like a dying flower and resigns its color to its lifeless decline.
Slowly dying, softly too, and supposedly peaceful
But no one knows what the eyes look like from the inside out.

No one talks about this.
But still, this is as real as it gets.
No one regards the sadness of the moment, and no one thinks of the inflicted as anything else but sick or suffering.

And me?
Who am I but another inmate?
Who am I but another moving part and a subjective member of Purgatory’s solitary confinement.

But either way; no matter what I do or see, and no matter what is said or done to me, I have to try.
I have to fight, even if I can’t fight.
No matter what the judges do to my case of if I am freed or sentenced to consecutive life sentences to run concurrent with the executioner’s request that I take the guillotine twice and be reconstructed to have my head re-sewn or reattached to cut it off again, —no matter what’s done, I have to reassemble myself.
I have to salvage what’s left.

I have to separate myself from the diseases, or the thoughts which otherwise bring me towards my demise.
I have to dream, by any means.
I have to close my eyes to see my freedom.
I cannot let the prison walls beat me.
I can;t let the accusers win simply because they decided to play dirty or pull a trick.

I have to keep my head or I will lose my sanity to a psychosis that degrades me worse than the pinprick, or the self-propelled deaths that happen so often.
I have to reverse and defy the sad submissions of self-induced comas that never revived me.
Otherwise, I die each day and never find myself to be reborn so that I can try to live, or wake up tomorrow and try to live again.

“Keep the noise down,” shouted someone from down the corridor.
I wonder what they mean.
What noise?
Or maybe this is another voice manifesting my fears that I should watch out because, “Something wicked this way comes!”

Purgatory is a little cold this time of year.
Or maybe this is all expected and I was hoping for something better.
The roaches and the rats all search for the warmth that comes from the radiators, to which I can say that I do not mind their absence.
I don’t mind them.
It’s the leaches and the invisible parasites that concern me.
It’s the friendly smiles that worry me. 

I don’t mind the cold separation between me and the rest of the world—but in fairness, the time is hard and my sentence in solitary is killing me.

The guards slide their filthy trays through the slot and the food, which is inedible at best, has become somewhat of a timestamp that allows me to judge time in the folds of morning, noon, and night.
There’s no change in lighting here. There’s no glimpses of the sun.
There’s no hints of the seasons here and there is no clock on the wall.
But ah, I can hear the time as it ticks which is enough to make the sick even sicker.
I’m not crazy, I screamed out to convince the voices.

“Shut up down there!”

Another inmate chose to send a note.
I was asked about suicide. I was asked by someone who was contemplating the edge of their razor and wondered what would come next.
I don’t know what will come next, I said.
I assume you would slip away and no one here would know what you endured. No one on this side of life would know if there was relief on the other side of your decision.

I know that life would still move.
I know that despite the absence, his name would be thought of and mentioned and while his permanent solution to his temporary situations made sense to him, —elsewhere, there are people who wish he’d have reached out to them, just one more time.
There are others who would have to pick up where he left off.
And there is someone who would have to clean up the mess he left behind.
And rest assured, I said to him, blood like this never seems to clean off.

The pain might have stopped for him but the pain changed hands and the sadness is passed like a baton or an unwanted torch to those who lived on and lost their loved one.

“Would you understand?”

I was asked if I thought he was a coward.
I was asked if I thought people would hate him.
I don’t know about the coward part. I think it’s brave enough to ask someone for help, —even if you don’t want “the help.”
I don’t know how brave or cowardly it is to end it all because no one knows what to expect after they made the final cut. And no one knows what’s waiting for them on the other side.

I can only say this:
The prison in the mind is far worse than any physical enclosure. It distracts light and distorts the views we see in our personal reflection. Prisons like this warp the mental mirrors that contort our perception of self and lead us to see an inaccurate view of who we are and cause us to see us as ugly.

I was told, “I don’t want to die so much.”
“I just want it all to stop.”

And I get this.

I’m sure most of us understand what it feels like to lose ourselves or to lose our sanity to the gravity of some unfortunate pull.
I am sure that everyone has their own emotional quicksand that holds us under and causes us to drown in thin air.

In all fairness, I don’t know anyone who escapes life.
And I don’t know anyone who escaped Purgatory either.
But I’ve started my tunnel. I weighed my options, and I’ve started to dig as deep and as far as I can get.
But my tools are wearing thin. So, I used my fingers as if they were claws.

The voices outside grew angrier. “Keep the noise down!”
I heard a man retching into his toilet a few cells down.
I heard he was detoxing.
Someone else said he was starving.
Another man said he was dying.
And one of the guards said, “What’s the difference?”

The truth is no one knows when they’ve gone crazy because our relationship with sanity disappears and yet, to the sick, this is normal.
To the sad ones, this is par for the course.
To the angry, rage is the fuel that stokes their fire.

I think this is how the cannibals find their flesh in the morning.

But to the repentant or to those seeking redemption comes the realization that our sanity was compromised by an inaccurate truth.
This is a trick that our devils pull, to keep us guessing or to bury us before we learn to dig ourselves to freedom.

I have no choice but to visualize my freedom, —or again, I need to see the joyous estimations of my Heaven on Earth.
I want to see the beads of water from an ocean as they dribble down her sides. I want to see her pull her hair away from her face after plunging in the water.
God . . .
She is beautiful!

I need to believe that despite my time; I am loved and I am wanted and yes, even me, even the way I am, busted mouth, crooked eyes, broken ears, scars and all—I need to believe that I am desired and craved, or yearned for.

I have to remember the sense of touch and remember the smell from her skin. I have to relive the sensation I felt when her hands touched mine.
I have to keep my pictures clear to keep my sanity intact.

I was asked if I ever thought about “doing it” or leaving Purgatory like the man who left yesterday in a box.

It would be a lie to say that I don’t have my share of unfortunate thoughts.
It would be a lie to say that my doubts don’t have a way of beating me down.

Would I do it this way?
Would I rather die than wait for my date before the judge or the parole board . . .

 I have thought about this long and hard.
I can’t do it.

“Why not?”
What if she really wants me?
Because what if she looks for me?
I won’t be anywhere she can find me.

“Do you really think she loves you?”
I don’t know.

Maybe she never did and maybe she never will.
Maybe she is only as real as the voices down the hall.

But in case she comes for me, I have my dreams and my place, which I keep in my heart.

And one day, if she agrees to it, —I swear that she and I will dance on that beach in my dreams.

“So, you mean to tell me that all of this is about a girl”
Yeah, well . . .
In fairness, she’s not just “a girl.”

She’s my girl.
And God, yes!
She’s beautiful.

The guards try to keep me from seeing the sunlight.
And that’s okay.
I remember the way she smiles and to be honest, she smiles bright enough to make the sun jealous and the moon envious that neither of them can make my world turn like she does.

“All for a girl, huh?

Not “a girl.”
She’s the girl . . .

“Do you love her?”
More than anything.
Yes. I do.

I love her more than Father Time loves Mother Earth.
I love her more than the seas love the shore and more than the wings of an angel love the soul they wrap around.
I love her perfectly.
I can tell you that much.

But what do I know?
The voices say I’m crazy and for all I know, she says the same thing.

I heard a noise.
The sound of shaken keys and footsteps came from outside

Sh…
I warmed myself
I hear the guards coming.
Maybe they have news about my case.

“Or maybe breakfast will be delayed until dinnertime  tomorrow.”
Either way, at least I’m one step closer to an answer.

“Prisoner #7940178”
Yes?
“Is that you again?”

“Stop talking to yourself. You’re making the other inmates restless. . .”Yes sir.

Like I said, 
no one knows when they’re crazy
Or whether the voices are real (or not)

“Can you smell them?”

No.
But I do smell her in my dreams.

“Good, then I guess maybe she is real.”

I hope so, Satan.
I really do.