This is my Home

Sensitive topic warning - themes of death and imprisonment.

This is my home; it's a funny kind of home. The walls are cold to the touch. They have shiny paint that covers bumpy plaster. Names are scored into it – messages that have been painted over, written and painted over again. Thoughts have been recorded there and then muted with cheap emulsion. I have scratched my own into it too, but they will soon be erased with fresh paint for the next tenant. I have four equidistant walls. If I stand up and stretch my arms like an eagle, I can touch opposite walls. That doesn’t make me feel powerful. It just shows how much time I’ve spent being idle here. I know the room intimately. I know every crack, every lump, every mark. There are no surprises. I long for a surprise, even though I know the next time I’m surprised, I’ll be afraid.

I have a bed that’s as flat as a board. They say it’s good for our backs. I don’t have anything I don’t need. I have a basin, a chair and a small table. I don’t have any personal effects around the room. It’s funny how you adapt to anything, if you’re there long enough. There were so many items in my old home. Now I am streamlined and unburdened by things. I’m just burdened by my future. It’s like a locked room with drawn blinds. I can’t access it yet, and even if I could, I wouldn’t feel any better.

Everything is white and brown. I’ve almost forgotten what colour looks like – how it feels to see it. Sometimes, on bright days, I get a chink of sunlight through the vent. I can close my eyes and feel it envelope me. I can almost remember the blessing of being kissed by the sun. Here, there is only grey dankness, muted tones, and lights out. I sit on my bed, lie down, pace the room. I feel like I’m a human experiment; one to test how long it takes someone to crack up. But I won’t.

This is my place of comfort. It’s all I have. It’s better than being on the street. I know that from experience. I don’t have entertainment. I don’t have a TV set. I don’t have internet. I don’t have luxuries. I get my dinner delivered to my room and I eat it alone at the table. I take my time with every bite. It breaks up the day. I live for the simplest things, like being allowed into the exercise yard, alone, going to the toilet alone, sleeping alone. That’s the thing that I like about this place. It strips away all the noise and centres you on what you were missing in your busy life outside. I don’t have any stress, so long as I keep thoughts of that final day from my mind.

The room is always there for me and never changing. It’s more than I could say for any of the people I encountered during my years of liberty. Maybe I didn’t inspire loyalty in them with my own actions. I’ve had a lot of time to ponder them while I’ve been in this room. The fact I’ve been sentenced to death makes it harder to feel remorse. I think it’s something I am just lacking. It doesn’t mean I don’t still have human needs.

The prison guards are the closest thing I have to family now. They bring trays of food and toilet rolls and clean sheets. Other than that, my existence is solitary. When I’m bored, I read books, but it’s hard to concentrate the closer I get to the big day. I have a deck of cards, but it’s no fun playing solitaire a thousand times in a row. I sweep out my cell and keep it pristine, but it’s so simple there isn’t much in the way of cleaning.

I would clock watch if I had a clock. It’s probably best I don’t. My meals are the only markers of time now. When I go outside to exercise, I barely have the strength to do a circuit of the yard. My body has weakened from underuse. There isn’t much fight left in me, even though I was a fighter all my life. Being sentenced to death tends to have that effect on you. There’s a fatalistic feeling that comes from knowing, no matter what I do or don’t do, my sentence will not change.

One of the walls of the room is painted to look like a bookcase. I know it isn’t for my benefit. It’s a sliding door that will reveal my instrument of death when the last day comes. I’ve had a long time to think about it, and I know that’s what it must be. There is no other decoration, so it’s completely out of place. It gives me the creeps more than any of the whitewashed knobbly walls with scratch marks in them. It’s too polished and I don’t know exactly what it’s hiding. It will be revealed to me some day soon. I’ve stopped counting the days. It’s better not to. I have no choice but to make the most of this home I have and the little, limited life I lead in it.

The prison guards seem to like me, and I might appear to like them too. But it’s all a façade, because in the end, they’ll lead me to my execution, and we won’t be friends then. It doesn’t matter how many jokes we’ve shared to pass the time, how many personal stories we’ve exchanged, how many of my basic needs they’ve attended to. It will be impossible to like them then. They will not stand between me and my fate. They will willingly take me to it, like the Judas of the prison system. I will leave my home forever then, and will I be sad about it? I probably will. All endings are bittersweet. If I had to live a life sentence in this cell, I’d probably despise it, but in this context, it’s home sweet home.