This isn’t liberation. Liberation is already here. It is because we don’t need to know that the prison will fall and that we don’t need to make any better sense of our roles than already instantly clear, that is liberation.
I wouldn’t agree until I actually agreed.
What category do you seek?
I say, I don’t seek any category.
And do you believe that?
I didn’t understand so I said, “No.”
He looks up and down the hall, You don’t fit any category and neither would they. But they have it, have it so that the books have shelves and the people have careers; society has spectacle, and the moment feels bolder. It feels purposeful. It needs to be more than just a moment passing. It must feel momentous.
I used to agree without listening; I agreed so that they would include me in the conversation.
It doesn’t feel momentous.
The Prisoner looks down at his coffee, They will seek to make your execution momentous. Same as mine. Same as theirs. But maybe more for you.
It didn’t make much sense.
It does not make sense.
I agree with him on that, It doesn’t make sense and doesn’t seem to make a difference. Not in the grand scheme of things.
“Grand scheme,” he says aloud. Out of place.
Then I say, The world is bigger than society.
Society is on the world, the world is not the society.
I agree with this too.
The Prisoner looks at the floor, the faded green of the prison block, There was a time when the world existed without society.
I agree, “It might happen again.”
We both agree, but in that moment that there might be something else, we come up empty. It just is.
There’s nothing to hold onto, not unless we give it the benefit of the doubt, the choice to believe in what isn’t there, but might. I would need to hope for it, and that did not look to be here.
It is irrational.
Checks and balances and roles and the stage, it all seemed rational but beyond the imprint of value, every dollar having symbolic value, every role having symbolic role, every action having a symbolic moral implication, it is just action and inaction. It is people together living until death comes.
The Prisoner lowers his chin. I interpret it as a nod.
Looks at the coffee, almost sips it but doesn’t. But to say that he agrees would be assumption.
I finish mine and soon have to use the toilet.
When I return to the bars, the Prisoner is gone.
The Prisoner does not drink the coffee. He leaves it on the narrow sliver of space between the bars. When it falls, it spills across the hall.
No one cleans it up. Its effects are temporary.
It dries and leaves no trace.
The strangest thing isn’t who I am, it’s that there is any momentum at all. When I sit up in bed, tuning into everything around me, I hear the gentle hum of what feels like time, the earth, the world hovering, feeding the being.
There is no control to this. I cannot stop it and interpret so I listen. I can only listen. The strangest thing of all is that I feel liberated in that moment. I feel everything fall out of place and exist as its own.
I see nothing in the lightless block.
Don’t need to look around to see it all. It is all there. There isn’t much to it. The line is a path that can only be genuine. It extends for however long a being walks. But the line blurs quickly. Like walking in snow, the line doesn’t exist moments after the person passes that point.
The strangest thing is that as I wait for death, there are others waiting for something to happen, believing life hasn’t yet begun. They hope for a good day. They hope that their new promotion will explain everything about their lives. They hope to go back to school so that their education will reveal more. Most of all, beyond it all, they seek the appreciation. They hope to join in on walking the line toward a fruitful life. When it might be that life is all that is assured. They live their lives without their notice.
The strangest thing is to see the line documented across society, used like branding, used and interpreted to be so much more than it really is.
I don’t know what it is. It is, maybe, nothing.
But I know that I am alive. I accept that I am soon to die.
I accept that all people live and die.
I accept that all people hope; it is natural. They hope to find meaning in the society that educates them and demands them to pay for entry.
There is something irrational that leaves something missing.
I hear the silence that isn’t really silence at all. That hum prevents it from being silent. This is the contradiction. This is what makes it all irrational.
For a moment I look at the notepad and consider making sense of it, writing it down. But I don’t.
That would complicate things.
I feel it now and I think enough to understand, though I can’t say that I believe. It is absurd to think anything more than the thought.
Those thoughts nearly drove me mad.
The same way their values, their actions, drove me inward, and caused my denial, my blind actions. I killed a man. I did. But I wasn’t there for the kill. I explained this — but I accept that I killed a man. It is as plain as that.
When I sit up in bed, at the dead end of night, I am the most alone. It is this loneliness that allows every thought only a moment’s stay.
If I sat up in bed late at night as a free man, I wouldn’t be free. I would be commanded to my laptop, my phone. I would look at a screen and I would delve. I delved for pages. The illusion made across likes and comments, constant activity, the thought that it all fits together. Everyone online searches for the very same thing they seek walking the street, working in their offices, on their soul-searching vacations.
They seek, but are willing to take the first thing they find.
It is on these sorts of nights, in a cell that offers no hope, that I can almost see something. I can almost liberate myself from this.
But I don’t. One moment in my cell could feel like forever, and I could easily live the rest of my life here. Nothing is taken that I didn’t give away.
Only tomorrow had any meaning, the routine masking actuality.
Once I lead the conversation — for a brief moment, I thought that perhaps it wasn’t too late to prolong my death.
People never change their lives. They are changed by their lives.
But the Prisoner wasn’t speaking.
After awhile, he left me at the bars for good.
That day I stood at the bars, looking at everyone that passed. I was like the other prisoners. They glared at each other, throwing objects at guards that passed. They were angry. And so was I. The anger blinded me and gave me something to believe in. I believed that having nothing to believe was horrible, was not worth the life to live. I looked and found nothing.
I was angry.
I thought back to the trial as if I hadn’t already given it too much thought; the trial, for it to exist, needed categorical meaning. It had only one consideration in order to make it just under society’s vast standards: I needed to be considered a monster. I needed to be the absolute opposite of humanity, of someone with a heart. Even though my heart still beats, and they will be the one that makes sure it stops, they used who I was and made me who I am.
I became a prisoner like any other prisoner. I fit in how I thought I wanted to fit. I was treated to work detail. I left my cell. I used the showers, I fended off the threats of others.