The Prisoner Project

THIRTY ONE

"Be faithful unto death,
and I will give you the crown of life."
— Revelations 2:10

THIRTY ONE

NICHOLAS HAD NEVER really thought about anyone. He had never cared about anyone else but himself, and it had always seemed enough for him. His heart was no hotel, it was so small and frigid that it couldn't even contain himself. He knew he was a psychopath — sociopath if you wished to coat his derangement with decency. He bordered on schizophrenia, and battled on the spectrum of bipolar. He was dangerous.

Nicholas knew that his only purpose for being alive was suffering. He knew that every breath he took was a sin and that he was supposed to be dead, decades ago — but death was the easy way out and everyone in SSCD knew this.

Outside the prison walls, Nicholas had died two days after his arrest. Many prisoners, like him, had been declared dead to the public and granted death certificates — yet lived like ghosts within the decaying prison walls. Did you know it was possible to be a ghost even when you were living? A blatant contradiction, yes, but believe it when I tell you that Nicholas was dead. That's what happens when you shut the criminally insane in isolation for years. Leaving them alone with their maddening thoughts? They died a little everyday.

Now imagine how much life is left after a decade.

To everyone, Nicholas was a blasphemy. But no one would understand, or believe, that the dehumanised Prisoner 143 actually had emotions.

He buried them alongside the memories of the corpses he had piled. He had suffered immensely in his life — abused from the moment he was conceived, to the moment he had been incarcerated— and so he reassured himself with the belief that he was only giving back the same energy he had received to the universe.

But sometimes, once in a blue moon, when Nicholas was alone in his cell, he would close his eyes and wonder — Do I have to be I this way? — and the thought that he could have been any different, that he could have lived a normal life, would throw him into a frenzy so violent that he would be unable to control his actions.

He would be blinded and gagged by all the guilt and anger that he had suppressed for decades. He would choke — and then he would beat himself up for thinking about it.

Nicholas would ball his fists into angry shells and crack his knuckles against bloodied cell walls, he would take his fingernails against his skin like flint, and he would throw himself against the metal bedpost. Anything.

And then he would stop only when he was bloodied and hideous, when he was certain that he could feel nothing but excruciating physical pain, when his thoughts were focused only on how he fucking deserved it.

Just to clarify, Nicholas had never tried to kill himself but he did want to die. Not by his own hands though. That was sickening to him. He had used his hands to take many lives, and taking his own life with them felt disrespectful.

"I did the right thing." He would reassure himself as he slumped against the concrete flooring. Just minutes before he would pass out from pain, he would grin widely at his antics. Laugh a little even, and whisper. "I win"

And that was inherently funny because Nicholas knew he was only fighting with himself. He was battling with his own psyche so although he was winning, he was losing too.

He had only felt this way a handful of times but the most vicious of them all — the day he nearly died from his self harm, was the hours after he realised that he had indirectly ended the life of the only person who had admitted to trusting him.