by Allison Moore

Created on: June 25, 2009   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

Not too long ago, I placed little value on my freedom, like the old saying "You don't miss a good thing until it's gone." That is why it was so easy for me to trade it. Prison was designed to be a deterrent for the lifestyle I'd become accustomed to - may way of life.

Today I'm confined to prison walls I can see, and the reality of man-made limitations I can measure. I'm engulfed in loneliness, indescribable loneliness. I've lost all control of my life, what fraction of it I still possess. I've been reduced to life's simplest form, sometimes being considered less than a person. Every day I'm reminded that I've lost control over mere decisions, like when to get up, when to take a shower, and for how long. I'm told when to go to meals, where to sit, and no longer eat to enjoy but out of necessity. I can't decide who or when I may talk with someone, and uniformed officers control the volume and tone of my voice.

Each day is the same as the day before-anew world for me to experience, one in which everyone is the same. We dress alike, eat the same foods, and share in the same misgivings. I'm in a place overpopulated with people who no longer hide behind emotions and failing expectations. I'm in a place where I am not allowed to make simple choices. I have to live by rules that are simple in more ways than one. I'm surrounded by hundreds who are bound by the same chains of unfulfilled goals and dissolving dreams. I'm in a place where I merely exist as a case, a blue file, an assigned number, forced to cope with the solitude-forced to cope with what I've lost. It doesn't matter if I don't know what to do. Someone will tell me. After all, I've proved to the world that I'm incapable of making it on my own. I had my chance. I gave it up. It was my foreseeable end.

Now I tremble with fear because I'm comfortable. My friends and family are disturbed by my cheery attitude, my smile when I should be crying at the devastation I've created for myself, my husband, my family, and my children.

Shocked by my own attitude, I lay on my bottom bunk and stare at my surroundings: my cramped living quarters, my pictures fixed to the cabinet with toothpaste, my bar of bright yellow state issued hand soap that rests on a sanitary napkin wrapped in light pink as my soap dish. The cluttered stainless steel table and stools hold borrowed books, Chicken Soup for the Prisoners Soul, and my Bible. My brown cardboard box with a lid, marked OL8397, contains all I own, all someone else said

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