The cells have a banal scent to it that’s a farrago of mold,musk from previous occupants’ tenure,and despair;yes even despair has its own hopeless and filty scent.I flood the cell with hot water.Throw soapy water unto the walls and ceiling, and then clean every part of the cell.It can take hours or days,depending on who was in the cell previously and how clean or decent the soigne person is or isn’t.It’s a task I don’t want to do, thou it’s one I dread doing. 

    Solitary confinement is a metaphor of expressive neglectful riches.For example;all held within solitary are Jonahs and death row is that ‘big fish’.And since time in here has no backbone and isn’t a certainty,three days could mean three years or three decades,or all points in-between.You spend evey aching moment alone.You wrestle with your thoughts and mentally assault yourself with your failures:what could have been, and those lustful desires of a future being free that is more fleeing than promising.

    The Quakers was the first to implement solitary confinement to the American penal disciplineship,but even they understood that isolation should not succeed ten-years of ones life,because the ‘long term’ prognosis shows that it do deteriorate ones mind and body.You start to break down-knowingly or unknowingly.I’ve known men who severed their dicks off out of frustration or demented illusions that their manhood was unfit to every use again,or it now represents a lost art of happiness.I knew a man who sat still while he lit himself on fire.I know a few who committed suicide.I know many who cut on themselves or many more who loose all sense of reality and begin hearing voices and seeing ‘ghosts’.I was talking to a guy the other day and he was normal.The very next day he just snapped-started hearing people talk about him and fearing that people was trying to come in his cell and kill him.And it was not an act.

    People that befriend me often celebrate the fact that in their minds I am[mentally]strong.I know they are being kind and mean well.Or perhaps in their minds I really do appear strong which would only mean I am a good “actor”.But the truth is, I’ve had suicidal thoughts as well.I struggle with daily depression: Endogenous depression.I’ve been abused by solitary confinement’s psychological fustigation for so long that the irony is I actually feel comfortable when I am...Alone.

    I am not prepared for death(to be fairly honest)and yet in the corners of my mind-death is my ‘Salvation’,if being freed from this concrete hell is not in my future’s cards of Liberation.

    It’s 5:55p.m.

    I’m existing through every tick of the clock.I’ve seen 5:55p.m. some 8,212 times and counting.Knowing this I realize existing is not the same as Living.  

 

    

 

             Written by: Charles ‘Chucky’ Mamou/2021