I watched the cell door close on the life we were supposed to have.
She thought she was saving me.
“You nearly destroyed me,” I say to the wall covered in her face, heat crawling up my spine. “But you didn’t. You just…” I huff a humourless breath. “You made me patient.”
Prison didn’t kill what I felt.
It concentrated it.
Took everything else away. Friends. Freedom. Sky. Touch. Noise that wasn’t someone screaming or steel clanging shut.
All I had was time.
Time and her name.
Time and the letters she sent back unopened, the envelopes crumpled by some disinterested guard and tossed into my cell like trash. I smoothed out every one. Wrote the date she rejected me in the corner. Stacked them neatly under my mattress like a spine.
I reach down now, grabbing one from the nearest pile. Her handwriting is on the front—neat, slightly slanted, the way she used to write my name in the margins of her school books so our mother wouldn’t see.
Kai Everly
HMP Greyside
Prisoner 49762
RETURN TO SENDER.
Big black stamp across the centre.
Beneath it, in smaller letters, the first one that really fucked me up:
Recipient refused correspondence.
A lie.
She never refused me.
They did it for her.
She begged them to keep me away.
I tear the envelope in half with a calmness that feels almost surgical. The rip is clean, practiced. I’ve done this a hundred times. I don’t need the outside anymore.
What matters is inside.
Not the letter—my words are burned into my brain, I don’t need to read them.
What matters is that she knows now. That I kept them. That I read every one in the slant of fluorescent light that passed for day in that place and imagined how her face would look saying the words she forced me to hear from someone else.
I drop the paper.
It joins the mess on the floor.
The voicemail keeps playing.
I miss you. God, I miss you.
I grab my phone again, dragging the bar back, listening to that part over and over until the line between confession and punishment blurs.
