Voices of the Incarcerated - "The Sound of Life Passing Me By"

The Sound of Life Passing Me By

by Roman Neal, contributing writer, Prison Writers

The ticking of the clock is the one thing people seldom notice. With the advent of digital watches, one would be hard pressed to hear the ticking of a timepiece in this day and age.

When I first walked into the system eighteen years ago, time was not something that I measured, it was just a relevant, yet unnoticed part of life. Back then, I figured that I had all the time in the world to achieve my goals, get my freedom, open my business, get married, start a nonprofit that helps create jobs in third world countries through foreign investments. I thought I’d watch my kids go to and graduate college, get married and give me grand babies to spoil.

Eighteen years ago I never saw me looking back and wondering where all the time had gone. I never saw me living with so many regrets, disappointments, bitterness of soul over opportunities missed and lost to time.

In this environment, the ticking of the clock is almost nonexistent, the noise that comes with doing time is such that one may sometimes wonder at silence.

I recall walking into the kitchen at 4 in the morning and stopping in awe at the silence. So rare is silence in the administrating of time that to come in the presence of it is almost hauntingly mesmerizing. It’s in those rare silence that I get to hear the ticking of a clock on the wall and those times remind me that time is no longer on my side. I’m reminded that I’m not a twenty something with plans that don’t have to be rushed. In the silence enshrouded ticking of the clock on the wall, I’m faced with the realization that I’m a mid-lifer with nothing to show for myself. Time now exposes me to be the failure that I tried so hard to prevent from being.

I remember on my second year of this sentence walking on the flat top and encountering two guys who were talking on the walk. I casually asked them if they knew what the date was and they shook their heads in ignorance and told me that they didn’t count days. I was thrown back by their unwillingness or inability to count days. They told me that men with their kind of times who have done as much time as they had don’t count days.

I asked them how they measured the passing of time and they told me that they counted the months. These guys were in their early thirties and had done more than fifteen years each. I sobered up, and expressed my condolences for the amount of time they had done, and scampered on. I returned to my dorm and took out a calendar and tried to envision me counting months and found it impossible as every day counted in the world where I’d just left.

If you’re wondering why I offered my condolences to the two young men, it was because I knew something was dead inside of them. It wasn’t clear and apparent to the average observer, but time had suffocated the life out of the hope that they were supposed to have.

I could see their chance of gaining freedom had been stripped away from them by a biased, racist, and institutionally unfair court system that trivialized major constitutional violations as “harmless errors” and thus dashing away the light of hope inside of tens of thousands.

I inwardly grieved to think of young men spending the most productive years of their lives stuck behind walls unable to produce anything, have anything or contribute anything to life and the people they have in their lives.

Fast forward eighteen years later and I, too, am in the position to grieve as I look back at how time has ticked its way past me in a world where the noise, commotions, and unrelenting violence leaves you with little time to take inventory of time lost until it’s nearly too late.

They say that with age comes the loss of hearing, but with me it’s different. The older I get, the more distinct the ticking gets. I hear it when talking to old friends who are sharing their achievements and successes with me. I’m happy for them and celebrate their wins, but in the silence of the night, the ticking reminds me of my losses. I receive pictures of family and friends on their vacations and I smile for them, but the ticking reminds me that I’ll never soak my feet in white sandy beaches again, and I quietly sigh.

My friends brag about their grandchildren, and the ticking reminds me that I don’t have a child to bury me when my time on this planet is over. There are weddings, graduations, promotions, grand openings, retirements, and some parties for no reason at all.

The ticking of time reminds me of health scares in an environment where health care is abysmal at best. The once silent clock is now my worst tormentor, it wakes me up from an exhausting sleep in the morning. It keeps me awake during sleepless nights. I hear it when a 20-something year old child raises his or her voice at me in directive, and I’m compelled to bite my tongue because he or she is an officer and I don’t want to escalate a situation.

I hear that irritating ticking when visitation call is sounded and my name isn’t one of the ones called. The ticking drowns out the other noises when friends are buying their second and third homes and I’m faced with the reality of being a forty something year old man with less than a dollar to his name. It resounds when uncles die. It reverberates when aunties die. It crescendos when life long friends die, and only blares louder when it reminds me that I will die too, a lonely death surrounded by callous predators.

In the last year, I’ve read news of inmates dying in their cells and not being discovered until their corpses begin to rot. I’ve watched videos of bodies hanging on prison railings for hours before someone in authority removed them.

I hear the ticking telling me that I’m next. The Bible speaks of Hell but trust me when I say that time and its ticking is Hell.

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You can read more stories featuring voices of the incarcerated at the Prison Writers website. Prison Writers works with incarcerated writers one-on-one to improve their writing and communications skills. They stay connected through snail mail, through several prison email systems and, in many cases, through direct phone calls with founder Loen Kelley.