Prison was actually a surprisingly honest place.
It forced me to see with total clarity that in this lifetime, there was never anything to look forward to.
Even the worst nightmare I had ever dreamed was nowhere near as ugly as this place.
From the moment I stepped inside, I stopped thinking about ever getting out.
Looking back at every day I had lived through, the world outside wasn’t any better anyway.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live.
If stepping out of these walls could actually trade for a better life, I would fight with everything I had to survive.
Yet reality offered no new path.
“If suffering is all that waits everywhere,” I whispered to the cold dark, “what difference does it make where I die?”
In the chill of this quiet cell, my eyes caught a familiar shape through the high bars—the thin crescent moon.
My crescent moon.
It had been so long since I last truly looked at it.
In that quiet moment, a sudden wave of memory brought my mother back to my heart.
I wondered where she was right now, how she was managing to survive.
Every single moment of my past—every memory I had carried—flooded into my mind like a rising tide.