Prison Stories
The Boy Who Lived
What the gift of Harry Potter meant to this closeted gay prisoner
I’ve been caged for seven months now, and I’m beginning to forget what it feels like to be free, to be a human being. I subsist on a diet of self-pity and molded bologna smacked between sheets of white bread. Months ago, I was the son of a guru living on an ashram eating a vegetarian diet; now in jail, I don’t know what or who I am. If I’m honest, though, I was never truly free.
Addiction does that, locks you inside a body and mind that feel foreign and hostile, a quadriplegia of the conscience. So does growing up in central Florida and hiding that you’re gay. I wonder if I’ll ever be comfortable enough to have a boyfriend, to watch badly acted rom-coms while cuddling on a couch with another man. I don’t think people like me deserve that.
The actuality of jail is designed to sever the spirit from the body, to break the inhabitant. I feel broken, and brokenness is insidious. It slowly seeps into the soul, drip after drip, drowns its vessel in hopelessness. Days drag on, one after the other, in a never-ending series of sameness. This is incarceration.
It’s a Tuesday, which means nothing in jail. After breakfast, it’s mail time, and a few lucky inmates in the block have their names…
