Dear W;

This is the last place I expected to reach out to you. After all, look where I am, look where I ended up. I mean, it’s so weird being in prison and to be here so long. I truly think I lost a part of myself here, I really, truly think I might have lost a bit of my humanity with all of the time I’ve spent here. It’s so strange when I look at myself in cracked bathroom mirrors, I look back and I don’t seen the person I once knew all of those years ago, I don’t see me, I see someone who is already dead on the inside, someone rotten. Part of me looks at that person and says “that isn’t you, this is just what this place made of you,” but I know it’s not true. You, after all, are the prime example of just how rotten I’ve become.

Prison is not the glorification that the movies and TV make it out to be. No one is really nice, the people here are nine times out of ten better off here. There’s drugs, sex, rape, all of the things we were put in here for going on while we’re supposed to be getting better. When the people look at me they see a murderer and the drug dealers and the pedophiles take a step back. There is a social class here much like there is in the real world. As a murderer, I sit near the top of that social class. While pedophiles, wife beaters, and drug dealers might kill someone down the line I took a life with my own hands. That is the different between us, that is the difference between me and the rest of them.

I can’t say that I’m proud for what I did, but part of me is grateful that I’m as high on that social ladder that I am. It makes thing infinitely easier, it makes it so the lower class respect you a little. I could more or less ask anything I want from my cell mate, some punk kid who got caught dealing some drugs to more punk kids, but I don’t. My hands are stained enough, I don’t need to indulge in the cliched prison behavior on some kid who gave pot to the wrong person at the wrong time. He’ll be out soon, but he’s also getting hard, I can see it every day that his sentence goes on. He’s coming a stone, like I am, with scars that people cannot truly see, with scars that run too deep and hurt too much to vocalize. I don’t do anything to the kid, but I certainly don’t defend him, and for that I reserve a seat in hell.

It’s strange to watch his transformation. I wonder if my own was so disturbing to watch. The punk kid cried on his first night and I did nothing to console him. However, I didn’t punch him in the face either, I simply law on my top bunk and listened to him, wondering why my first bunkmate didn’t do the same, wondering why he had to punch me in the face and tell me to suck it up, that if I didn’t I would never survive my life long sentence. I guess in a way I have to thank him, I did suck it up and now I’m okay, I survived.

I say survived because tomorrow they are going to put a needle in my arm. Someone said that my crime was too disgusting for me to allow to live and I was put to the death for what I did. When word of that got around people were even stranger around me. Now I was not only a murderer, now I’m a murderer on death row. It’s strange to think that in less than twenty-four hours I am going to be strapped down to stretcher and be injected with someone that is going to make my heart stop. It’ll be as simple as that.

I don’t know why I’m telling you of all people this, any of this. After all, you are the last person I would ever expect to care. In fact, I don’t know why I’m writing this at all. You are the one that made me rotten, it was you that made me this way. People try to find what makes a person snap and do what I did, but I have to say it was you. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, I don’t know if you set out to hurt me, but I hurt you, didn’t I?

You are the one that made me rotten, it was you, because you are the one I murdered all of those years ago. Now I’m a stone, a rock, a shadow of a human, because I killed you. I guess you’ll never see this, will you?

You’re dead and in less than twenty-four hours so I.

I guess you killed me back.