You remember the way the evening air ran like a lion chasing its prey, and the tall oak trees trembled in fear. Leafs, clenched in the jaw of the menacing wind, screamed in a frenzied melee.

Cracking through the fury of the wind came blows of music. It streamed from your guitar

as you smiled with youthful eyes and everyone else smiled with polite and mildly embarrassed eyes. The air thrummed with music and joy. You wore a cheap suit and a boyish grin, and you were starting to be afraid that everyone is getting annoyed with you but you stomached it.

Once the music ended it was replaced by the sound of polite applause. You bowed and then proceeded to run over and hug a man in a cheap tuxedo. He sighed and you did a little jump while you pumped a fist in the air. The woman in white beside him laughed.

You ran back off to your seat. Seeming a bit annoyed, your brother got up and thanked you. Maybe the hug was too much. A brief explosion of embarrassment flared in you, but the women in white winked at you. She’s nice. You hope she and your brother are happy together and don’t end up like your parents. It was silly to be embarrassed, anyhow. You were his little brother, it was your job to be annoying around him. That’s how you showed affection. But, no matter how irrational, a tiny flicker of embarrassment remained. Someone started giving a toast. They might have been a relative or a friend but their words floated and breezed past you with the wind. Your thoughts were currently on the cold that was biting through your dark skin. You wished that they had made the decision to do the wedding indoors, instead of out here, a couple miles out of the city. 

You were 18 years old, but everyone said that you acted like you were 13. You always laughed whenever someone said that, just because you didn’t know what else to do. You miss that, the laughter coming from your lips. You didn’t think that you acted like you were 13, you just liked having fun. You had planned on always being fun, always being full of joy, even as an adult. You wanted to be one of those adults who still watches cartoons and made jokes and didn’t look dead inside. Perhaps you could have been one of those fun uncles to your brother's children. You liked that idea.  

Anyway, you liked to think that you were still mature. Sure, you still slept with a stuffed elephant named Elton, but it's not like you thought that he was real anymore. In truth, you found it annoying the way people would constantly assume things about you, but you never spoke to anyone about it. You didn’t like confrontation.

The wedding wasn’t fancy, and your Mom acted like she didn’t care, but you could tell she cared. They couldn’t even afford a band, that’s where you came in.

If you could, then you would have told her that it didn’t matter, and that everything was perfect even though it was so very flawed. Perhaps you should have.

The wedding was winding down anyway. It wouldn’t have been that long till everyone drove home. There was no honeymoon planned for your brother and his bride. That would simply be way too expensive.

You were in a white chair, and the toast was still dragging on, and the wind was still spewing bullets of cold. They really should have done it inside, maybe at the church that you always went to. Sure, it was dirty and in a bad part of the city, but it was warm, and familiar. 

Familiar places are nice. You preferred the familiar to the unusual, nine times out of ten. Perhaps that’s why you still read comics and pretended that cardboard tubes were telescopes. Childhood innocence was like that sweatshirt your Mom kept trying to get you to throw out. You may have outgrown it a bit, but it felt comfortable in a way that only the familiar did to you. But, you believed that you had matured, and in a way you were right.

The toast maker had finished with their speech and had sat down. Your brother rose again from his chair, and you could tell that he too was tired and just wanted to go home.

It was at that moment when the faint sounds of sirens began to punctuate through the air and tiny fingers of nervousness tapped at your skin. Your brother briefly paused but continued speaking, his voice slightly wavering, while your brain was going down in flames. It didn’t make any sense. They were probably just passing through. There was no way. Even if they did find out, why would they drive all the way out here? The sirens continued to grow louder and louder while your stomach continued to sink. Your brain returned to some distant time when you were watching an episode of an old crime TV show.

You told yourself that they would just pass by, and maybe everything would be okay, but then the red and blue lights were there, on the other side of the gate. Your brother had stopped talking. No one was talking. Your brain leapt and jumped and stretched like silly putty that came to life as it tried to figure out something, anything to do, but all you could do was sit there, frozen. Someone screamed. There were pale men with guns drawn demanding to know if you were there. There was so much screaming, so much movement. You just wished that you could disappear, or slip back into some happier memory, and then stay there forever, in an eternal euphoric delirium. 

You found yourself standing up with your hands pointing at heaven and the men in blue uniforms were kicking you to the ground and putting handcuffs on you. They were dragging you away. You heard your mom screaming your name, and all the only words that managed to pry themselves out of your mouth were “I’m sorry.” 

It was a long car ride. 

They tossed you into that filthy cell. You spent the whole night crying there, in that cage. 

It may have been one, or it may have been two days till you saw your parents, crying.

You couldn’t think of anything to say except to apologize for your ruining of the wedding.

They talked about how they were trying to get enough money to pay for bail and that they were going to take this to court because you didn’t do anything, obviously. You were a “good kid” and they’d make it clear that “you’ve never committed a crime in your life”. That was the hard part. The part where you had to look them in the eye and tell them. The silence that followed after that burned like a flame and stank like raw meat. You saw your Mom weeping into your Dad's shoulder from behind the glass pane. Your Dad was also crying. You’d only seen him cry twice before.

It was funny, almost, to see your parents in the same place not arguing. It had seemed like a miracle when it happened at the wedding and now it was happening for a second time. 

That was eight months before the trial happened. What followed were eight months mostly spent sitting in a cell. The week before the trial, a pale man in a suit showed up, a “court appointed lawyer.” He talked about something called a plea bargain, and how you would probably only get five years or so because you were pleading guilty. You thought he seemed restless, as if he had something much better to do. You didn’t blame him. He probably had kids who were having a soccer game or something. He muttered some legal talk about how the amount would usually only warrant six months, but in this case it could be up to 25 years. You didn’t know what any of it meant, and you were too numb to care.

The trial was short, about 30 minutes. The judge also seemed restless, and a little bit bored. You also didn’t blame her. 

Two years later, and you were in a grey cell playing solitaire. The problem was the deck was about 10 cards incomplete so you kept losing. The only reason why you were playing was because you didn’t know what else to do. You could think, but you had already spent too long inside your head. You were a miserable speck of a man in a vast labyrinth of horror. Your days were filled with concrete walls and steel bars and men twice as big as you ready to smash your head given the slightest amount of provocation. An animal. That’s what one of them had called you. 

The man had a dog on a leash, a German shepherd that was snarling at you as you lay on the ground in fright. The man kicked you and you realized that the dog was probably being treated better than you. 

You were living in a world of shadows, cast by the walls surrounding you, blocking out the light. Shadows and misery clung to you like leeches as they drained you from the inside out.  

You had only gotten cards, as well as a sharpie, because of “good behavior”. In a brief moment of lunacy you had tried drawing the faces of people you knew on the cards. Perhaps it was because you hadn’t seen them in over a year. The only brief flickering moments of interaction with your family was through the telephone calls, and even those were fleeting, due to the price. Your brother was a dad now. You had cried when you heard the news, and you didn’t know why. 

You thought about the time you, your brother and your parents had driven up to some lake. Your parents had argued the whole drive there, you remember that. It was over something silly as well, like your dad had honked his horn or something. You remember how your dad was going to teach you how to swim, but he completely forgot. So, your brother had offered to help you. However, his method of teaching was to push you into the lake and yell at you. You managed to get yourself back onto the pier and then proceeded to drag him into the water, with you as well. You both ended up roughhousing in the water, with you trying to get back to the peer and him trying to prevent you from doing that. You were mad at the time, but looking back, it was one of the happiest experiences of your life.

It’s funny how everything looks so much better when it’s in a memory. “Moments are like wine.” Your grandpa had said that once, continuing, “They get better with age.” He had said that, completely unprompted, while you were watching TV. Once he was done saying that he turned around and left. 

Memories were all you had now. They were precious, like gold, and they were the only thing that couldn’t be taken from you. You had to hold onto them, memories of running and freedom and joy. All now faded and scratched and tinged with sadness, but still memories, nonetheless. They were the few gulpfuls of fresh air between the smog and shadow that poured down your throat. 

You looked down at your cards and at the ace of spades and wondered why they name a card type after a glorified shovel. Maybe you were going insane, enclosed in that slaughterhouse.  

You felt a deep loneliness surrounding you, so thick that you could almost touch it. You were practically swimming in it, drowning in it. You only had your memories to hold onto, that and the promise of a better tomorrow. This was all that kept you from sinking into an abyss that you feared that you could not return from.

Six months somehow dragged by. You were sewing a dress. It was part of your labor. The dress was pink and white and frilly. It looked expensive. As you watched the sewing machine stab it’s needle downward you thought about who would wear it. Probably someone rich, someone with a good life. Maybe they’d be happy when they received it. You hoped so. You remembered that someone had said it was for “Victoria's Secret”. You thought back to more than a year ago, prom night. You remember dancing and the feel of her dress. It was probably someone just like you who had made that dress. 

You tried to think if that was ironic or not. You thought that you should ask Chris, a long-timer. He was a tall beefy man with a limp and a friendly face. Chris knew all about irony, and metaphors, and subtext. He had wanted to be a writer when he was a kid. That was 20 years ago. You remember when they brought in some books, and the look in his face. Everyone had made fun of him, and the way he cried for joy, but he didn’t seem to care. You didn’t see much of Chris because the death penalty inmates and the regular inmates didn’t interact much. Chris liked to say that he had been waiting 20 years to die.

You weren’t paying attention and you accidentally cut your hand. A bead of red blood squirmed out from your skin. You look at it, the scarlet worm breaking out from your skin. You put your hand back under the needle and felt the iron tip sink through your flesh. Your blood began to seep onto the dress. These actions would warrant a punishment later, but you didn’t care. The needle jabbed into your skin over and over, driving out tendrils of your red blood onto the dress.

And it didn’t matter because you’ve already lost everything. It didn’t matter because you used to be the boy who played guitar and laughed and just wanted to enjoy life. You've been broken, and you don’t think you can ever manage to put yourself back together.

It’s a year later. You’re in your familiar orange jumpsuit, in a mob of other people. You’re 22 now, and you’ve been moved to a different prison. This one is a “private prison,” but you don’t know what that means.

You were with all the other inmates in the same old jumpsuit as you marched through the same old walls into the same old cafeteria. The stones and bars that made up the building were like company to you.

You remembered a time in elementary school where you had an assembly and two cops came to talk to the school. It was a bit funny, because the cops were doing the good cop and bad cop routine, perhaps out of the hope that the children would not recognize it. One cop, the good one, would talk about all of the potential every child had and how prison would ruin all of it. The other cop would wag his finger at the students, like a parent giving a stern talking to, and talk about how one in four of every kid in the classroom would end up in prison. 

He would sweep his eyes through the cafeteria as if sizing up all of the students, trying to figure out which ones would become criminals. He looked almost like some lady at the butcher, trying to find which meat was the best. The cops had said that prison was a place where they put the bad people away, as punishment and so they couldn’t hurt anyone else. Barely anyone had paid attention. One of the girls, Ramona, that was her name, had stood up and shouted something you couldn’t hear. All of the students had laughed, except for Ramona who was staring at them definitely through pink rimmed glasses.

You tried to remember what it was that happened next. The teachers were horrified, and one of them had tried to drag Ramona out of the building, but the good cop told the teacher that they didn’t have to do that. He said that the question was a good question. He asked Ramona what her name was, and said she was smart. 

Then he said something in response, but you don’t remember what. His smile was aggressively warm. He looked like a wolf, circling a wounded animal. He had said that he was just a police officer. He had said that there would always be crime, and there would always be men like him to stop it.

You remembered that Ramona was nice. She had a pin in her hair that looked like a bird. She was a big fan of birds, you remember that. You wondered where she was now. Maybe she was some sort of bird scientist, and right now she was perched in a tree in some foreign place trying to take a picture of some tropical bird.

It was a few months later. You looked at yourself in a mirror, at the beard now sprouting from your chin. You were a man now, you supposed. You had been violently chiseled by monstrous hands and the abyss that you had been plunged into, kept away from everything else. A loud sound gave off. It was time for you to go back to work.

The next day you’re sitting in your cell when a guard approaches your cell. He says you’re gonna leave today. You figure it’s some sort of prank, but he opens the door and tells you to gather your belongings. As you're walking down the hall, your head submerged in a fog, you start to realize that you’re actually leaving prison. Time seems so distant from where you are, that any recognition that it exists is a surprise. You’ve waited for this day for so long, but you didn’t even know it was coming. 

You’re sitting in your Mom's car. While you know you shouldn't, you take one last look at the place. It says it’s a “correctional facility”. You wonder how it corrected you. You wondered what needed to be corrected. Your Mom is there, looking 20 year older, and so is your brother and his wife. Your brother is at the front, driving. 

You arrive home and sink into your Mom's arms. Neither of you are able to stop tears from raining down from your eyes. 

The home seems exactly the same as it once was, six years ago, only you were completely different. It almost feels like you shouldn’t be there, like the home is too good for you. You’re not some kid any more. You believe that for the rest of your life you will be haunted by nightmares and question whether you are a good or a bad person.

You may someday find an answer to the question, but the nightmares will remain.