They moved me to Fairlawn Correctional in the fall of 2003.
You want to know what that’s like and I’m going to tell you the small things, because the big things don’t translate.
The small things:
The light in a cell never fully goes out. There’s a security bulb that stays on all night and after about a year you stop seeing it and after about ten years you realize you have forgotten what real dark looks like.
You eat fast. Not because anyone’s coming for your tray. Because everyone around you eats fast, and the body copies the room.
Your mother’s voice changes on the phone after about year four. It gets careful. She starts leaving out anything that might hurt. By year five there’s nothing left in the conversation except weather and what she made for dinner, and you can hear her working hard to fill fifteen minutes with that, and you can hear her failing, and neither one of you says anything about it.
