Solitude And Slumber

(Originally written and posted Oct 2019)

Since May of last year I've been constantly surrounded. Not a moment of solitude for over sixteen months straight. Not a single solitary instance where I've been alone. 

That's roughly 490 days days without privacy. Eleven thousand and five hundred and twenty hours without silence. Six hundred and ninety-one thousand and two hundred  uninterrupted minutes of company. And Forty-one million, four hundred and seventy-two thousand, seconds of constant witness. 

In the last few prisons I was at we had two man cells. When your celly would leave, you could close the steel flap on the door and be alone. Even if just for a few minutes, to take a shit, to jerk off, or to just breathe a few breaths by yourself, you could find some form of privacy. Since coming to this new prison, with open cubes, I've found yet another thing I had once taken for granted: Solitude. 

This slow and steady insanity, of constant interaction, will slowly creep up behind you. It will make its way up your pant leg, so gently that it will feel like a breeze. You will convince yourself that it's just your imagination. It might even be slightly perceptible as it works it's way up your spine. A subtle itch as it coils around your neck before coming to rest of the back of your mind, where, if you're not careful, it will take root and lead to a subtle form of institutional insanity.

It happens so slowly that it's hard to remember if you always carried this extra weight. And then, one day, you look around and wonder why your knees hurt so bad, why your feet are swollen, and why your back cramps up every time you move. Then it dawns on you: that you have been incessantly surrounded by other people for far too long and it’s taking its toll.

Like trying to stay awake when you're exhausted, you become convinced that all you need is a little break. Just a second to close your eyes. That you don't need sleep you just need to rest your eyes. 

There was a time in my life that I feared solitude. The thought of sitting alone in an empty, silent, house would make my skin crawl. I'd turn on a TV, or radio, just to make it bearable. Talk radio was the best because I knew it was real. Real people talking, and thinking, in real time, in the same moment as me. A one way conversation but it was just enough. Somehow I wasn't really alone if I could at least hear voices, or even the sound of someone else, of something else, of anything else...other than my own thoughts.

My mind would race in the stillness, my heart would sink in the silence and I would run, to chaos, to distraction, and head first into oblivion. And now with nothing, but the distracting chaos of oblivion, I yearn for the same solitude that I feared for so long. I now see its hidden value. I now see its beauty. I now miss its embrace. 

I finally see that it wasn't the silence and solitude, that I was running from, it was me. And in the beautifully twisted way, that life uses to teach me, I have finally come to understand the point that I had been willfully missing all of my life: That there is nothing to run from, nothing to avoid. All this time, I should have been running towards myself, through my mind, and into my heart.

Since coming to prison and changing the direction of my momentum I have come to know myself, to truly understand who I am, what I am capable of, and what I need to do. 

In this new found knowledge I must admit that I miss the solitude. This perfectly fucked up realization is priceless. Never again will I take an empty house, a silent space, a closed door, or quiet contemplation for granted. Never again will I not grasp the sanity that has been waiting on me for eternity. A sanity that proves harder to grasp and more elusive in this setting than anywhere else I have ever been. 

And though I may feel that I need just a moments rest, just a tiny break, that I just need to rest my eyes for a second, I will hold fast. No matter how exhausted I become, how tired I feel, or how heavy my eyelids grow, there is no rest to be found in here. 

What a terrible blessing it is to truly understand, first hand, the importance of slumber and solitude. An understanding, difficult in reaching, that I will never release. And god willing, when I make it out of here, I will take the time to appreciate the type of slumber only an insomniac will ever truly know...