A Tale of Two Prisons

I woke up to another day. The hours between now and sleep weigh on me like a thousand ton's of paper, all of which gather potential like dust, but for their mass I hide from them never knowing what wisdom, knowledge or power is contained within them. I don't want to know. Opportunity and variance are gaping maws looking fast on my routine. Without which, what even am I?

I spin to leave my bed, my solitary bed with my baby blue bedspread my mother gave me when I was a teenager and which I have rotated with my slate grey one for 32 years. I'd love to share my bed with someone, but a woman's smile is more terrifying than their scorn. I dream of being rocked by a woman, cooed to gently while I fall asleep on her lap. I feel nothing when even the most raunchy images are in front of me. I am sure this is not healthy. Perhaps I am sexless.

I look out the window, the concrete high rises are like shark teeth and myself a chunk of chumcicle forgotten about. One day I will be lost to the void of times ocean. I stand. The gristly moan of my joints is another reminder that I might have peaked, though this is a bit dramatic. I think I've just started going downhill from a short climb to my early twenties, to a plateau that has been most my life until now.

I brush my teeth and put some effort into smelling good and getting rid of my five'o'clock shadow, which if left looks like the backside of a mangy cat. Besides, I don't like drawing attention and making sure I do enough work to stay at the absolute average is much safer. I use a mid-range cologne, wear the clothes of designer outlets, and buff my shoes to an average sheen.

I put my grey trousers, my pale blue shirt and paisley tie on. I check myself in the mirror to see the man who is just the other side of disappointing. A middle manager for a small firm dealing in copper wire manufacturing. I have worked my way up, which is success. Though chose to stop just before the glass ceiling and made a little nook for myself. I can afford mid-priced wine, I can feed my cat the good food and I can sometimes go on holiday where I can take pictures of places and food I only dreamt about once, and see it just long enough to feel like its in my grasp. This I can add to the list of unachievable wishes upon which our great capitalist empire rests (and justifies its extortions) and promptly forget them before desire tears down my recycled cardboard kingdom. I only really do it to have something to say to my employee's because I read in a book that conversation is key to a happy work force.

Off to the office. I leave my apartment block in a decent part of the city, and get into my fairly decent 2024 Honda Jazz (silver). I sigh. There is something different about today. Something like a spring deep inside me which may have been twisted a twist too far. My breathing is heavier and I've become aware of a tightness in my chest. What is it? Why is it? I try and breathe deep but it feels like a giant has clasped me, and my panic is rising. I put my turn signal on and slowly emerge into traffic.

My grip tightens and untightens on the steering wheel. My eye twitches. Do I want to laugh? Shout? Cry? All three? I have not felt a rise of emotion in a while. Is this the open rebellion of my internal serfdom? Those feelings I relegated to peasantry and left to rot in my arrogance, rising up? The drives of passion, power and conquest allied in their fight against a most rational and by the book oppressor who only wanted calm order until one day his heart gave way after a chianti and to the sound of cat purrs?

I feel hot. My jaw is clenched. A man jumps into the road and I brake hard. I'm barely watching myself, barely aware of my movements as I jump out the car and punch him in the face. He turns to fight back, I withdraw my mace I carry for my own protection. He screams in agony as I spray him in the face with it and he buckles. I remember sick pleasure and power as I force his head in the car door, his wails and cries fuelling me. I shut the door on his head with glee and with a strength I have never witnessed in myself until he stops moving. I kick the body away, I drive to the next police station and turn myself in.

There's the bell. I stir and wake up. It was all just a dream. My Honda was a Civic (did I always want a Jazz?) I had three bed spreads, and one was green. I have a dog and not a cat. It's very odd why my dreams do this, why small details change.

I shuffle to the toilet, do my business and eat a slice of bread and some beans. The dream is terrible, powerful and intense. I think the nightmare is about who I used to be. The violent attack, for which really happened, amounted to little. The stirrings of my most primal organism burst forward, breaking a hard-forced chrysalis of conformity. The most interesting thing is how small I am in the dream. I am actually six foot tall and broad. Perhaps that was what I was reduced to: a dowdy animation from the studios of my soul. I look at myself now, my broad shoulders and my height and its like I never noticed my strength before. I always felt small.

Weirdly, I am happier here. Offices do not allow the frivolous, colourful and playfully aggressive tones I have come to enjoy here. I also have books, excitement, banter and the regularity is really no different. I am free of freedom's prison. Sure, there is no chianti nor pets. I don't get to feel the wind on my face either, but the wind is often bitter and filled with drizzle, so who needs the open air? I have friends, I have exercise, I get meals and can read to my hearts content. I think my nightmare isn't reliving the act, but reliving the experience of myself. The true horror of hell is not in fire, but colourless mundanity. Kind of like Sisyphus, but even he had a boulder! Something to struggle against, succeed at, and start again. I was on a flat plane, walking one way and then the other, each side essentially the same destination with different furniture - though I still had to spend time and energy to get there.

Prison puts it into perspective. This place of the damned has given me more freedom than my dreary life ever did. I've experienced the love of a man, and I didn't know what I was missing! My libido awakened one evening with some subtle petting with a man who I had come to see as a friend, which is one more friend than my life of freedom had - and now also more sex than my life of freedom had. We've been seeing each other for six months, we spot each other over bench presses and find ways to please each other through various holes in pockets and with backs turned. It's not the most popular thing amongst the rest, but they've all seen worse - the most bothersome are the ones who want to join in! Perhaps, I have always loved men, but it took the tender love of a criminal to wake me up to this fact.

I dread parole, as the outside world is far more chaotic and more prone to sucking life from us than these concrete walls and dinner bells ever could. I think the world should be switched. Why not have everyone get food, shelter, exercise, books, healthcare and education all for free on the tax payer. If you want to punish, kick the criminal from the security of a safe life full of expression and passion, to get a job and be lost as an individual in a sea of individuals. All grappling over each other for meaning which dangles on lines from the poles within the paws of the rich. Have them try test on the most basic values, where values change by the decade. Where maintaining a veneer is more cherished than the noble, and sometimes dark, heartwoods of our core mammalian selves. Where grand dreams are forced on children like the sugar which rots their teeth. Dreams a privileged few see fulfilled, so adulthood for so many becomes a mass grave of butchered dreams, so the ghosts of their childhood rattle chains of failure as if to blame them for a deception so long in the tooth none know who started it. Send the criminal where houses are hard to come by, food is processed and filled with poisons and where a hospital visit may well send someone into irrevocable debt for the greatest tragedies of their lives.

Freedom, perhaps, is more a prison. People are free to be lost with near infinite variety. Choosing freely at the great smorgasbord of chance, and getting irrevocable brain freeze regardless of the thousands of flavours at the counter. Pulling the grimace into a smile, for fear of showing the endemic pain simmering in the hearts of the free. Free to choose leaders who will always prefer their own and will extort. Everyone is free to complain and cry about it, but few- if any - are free enough to escape it.

Freedom is its own prison, one so deceptive you don't even know you are in it. At least the prison I am in is honest about what it is.

I respect that.