Hope in a Dark Place

            There aren’t many mirrors in jail and prison. To someone else far away from the realities of these places, not having a mirror seems banal. I sometimes find myself in conversations with unsympathetic patriots who don’t feel that inmates should deserve such luxuries like mirrors. “They did whatever they did to get in there,” someone said, “They can be okay with no mirror.”

            At first, I didn’t notice that there weren’t mirrors. I was in a state of shock the first time I went to jail. I had lived in Salt Lake City my entire life and never known where the jail was. I hadn’t realized it was so close. Close to bakeries and convenient freeway onramps and my dad’s work. Just right there. It’s deceptive from the outside; an ambiguous bureaucratic building of forgettablly average size. Inside, it turns inward and downward; a series of mazelike corridors that all look alike.

            It was the first time I felt claustrophobic, when I went inside and saw what had been hiding in plain sight all my life. I went into the cell, still in disbelief and and a state of horror that was inescapable. Like an earthquake; my entire world around me shaking. I didn’t notice the mirror. Or, the piece of metal screwed into the wall that looked more like a baking sheet than a mirror. I could sort of see my reflection. Hues of color that matched the ones on my body. Brown hair, smear of brown framing the blurred oval of my face.

I saw myself as clearly as I could.

I was released, unexpectedly, two days later. No charges. I returned a few months later, a self-surrender, once the charges became real. I remember, somewhere in that month, preparing for a court hearing and looking, from muscle memory, above the sink to where a mirror would be. My body had found that reflex to do a quick mirror check before leaving the house: nothing in the teeth, the hair where it should be, no makeup where it shouldn’t be. But I wasn’t in that piece of aluminum screwed to the cinderblock wall.

The mirrors in the prison were slightly better. The looked something like a mirror in the bathroom of a rest stop or recreation area; decent enough but not pristine. Passable as mirrors. But by then, by the time I arrived in prison, I had moved from shock and horror into suicidal ideation, and unbreakable metal mirror-ish plates had no place in my visions of death.

Somewhere along the line, I had just forgotten about mirrors, just like I had forgotten about having a smart phone and car insurance. All of those normal things that held the scaffolding of my reality had disappeared, and my life went on without them. I stopped looking for myself in mirrors. There was no point.

The day I was released from prison, I took a shower that was exactly the temperature I wanted it to be. I was by myself, behind a closed bathroom door. I wasn’t wearing plastic shoes. I wasn’t holding a crocheted shower caddy hanging from a warping hanger. I realized as I brushed my hair with an actual hairbrush that, once the steam cleared from the mirror, I would be looking at my face for the first time in over two years. It had been 26 months since I had last looked in the mirror the way a non-inmate, a “normal” person, does.

I had gained fine lines that I hadn’t seen in the aluminum fuzzy reflections. I felt sad for having not seen them, as if I had missed a piece of my own growth and development the way absent parents miss the first time a child strings their first full sentence together. I had gone into prison with a youthful face, only the slightest hint of crow’s feet and laugh lines promising to show. There were countless, miniscule wrinkles all over the surface of the skin on my face. The way a balloon wrinkles after its inflated and deflated. Somewhere in that twenty-six months of prison, that youthful elasticity had snapped.

I saw something heavy in my eyes I hadn’t remembered; something with gravity and force. It didn’t waiver. I noticed gray hairs, ones that weren’t there before but had grown along the way, without me noticing. So many fine lines. I had never understood what older women had been complaining about until I stared into that mirror the day I got out of prison. Mine crept into my skin through prison walls.

It has been years since my release, and I’ve still never found the habit of mirror-checking myself. I still go days without looking at a mirror. Prison had simply taught my brain to stop noticing them.

And then, today, I saw the clearest mirror of myself that I’ve ever seen. From the photo thumbnail on my work computer, he had seemed small, like the kind of tiny little guy who’s really 5’2” but dies on the 5,5” hill with “not heels” shoe raisers. When I walked into the jail earlier today, I figured that, when I met this guy, my 5’7” frame would stand over him.

I found him in booking. He had been heaped on a bench in a corner, when one of the officers called his name for me. He stood, and I turned toward the officer to thank him for his help. When I looked back toward him, I realized this man I had assumed to be small in frame was actually quite broad and tall, the center of his chest at my eye level.

Despite his height and stature, his head hung so low that I could see where he might one day have a bald spot. When I spoke to him, I bowed, tipping my head at the same angle I’ve found when trying to drink from a faucet or hose, trying to see if I could get his eyes to meet mine. I could not find his eyes.

I saw him as the mirror then, as the top third of his body hung limp like a sock that had once been a puppet full of life and googly eyes but, after removing the hand, becomes just an unassuming afterthought often forgotten. I talked, hoping he could hear me words, though I wasn’t sure. I noticed the curve of his spine. It was almost as if his body was completely normal from the ground up to his ribcage, but then, right at the bottom of the ribcage, everything hard, like bone, within his body had gone soft.

It made me think of a holiday contest I entered in grade school, where the challenge was to build the tallest structure out of edible ingredients. I had made two batches of rice Krispie treats for the frame, and both had failed; one too brittle, the other never setting at all, resulting in a crumbly, sort-of-kinetic-sand heap that was fun but not structural.

The top third of his body seemed to be made of that same mush: rice Krispie cereal, melted butter, and melted marshmallow, all holding together desperately against the weight of gravity and shame, trying against the realities of physics to maintain shape. He seemed to have no bones in his shoulders, or where his ribs would be. No neck, not even a skull, really. Just soft body tissue, piled on top of itself, hoping death would come faster.

It made sense why coming back to the jail for me was surprising. The first time I went back to the jail in a professional capacity, a decade after leaving it as an inmate, I was surprised by its smallness. It had been so large, so vast, so inescapable. I was at the same jail the other day, in a housing section visiting a different client. She was housed in the same pod that I had once been housed in. I spoke to her through glass, explaining that I was no longer her case manager because she had been sentenced to prison. Prison, a place I cannot reach people professionally. Professionally.

The section was smaller than I remembered. Just like how the courthouses shrank over time. My first memories of courthouses, when I started going into them, recall them as huge catacombs of coldness. For years, every time I’d go in a courtroom, my body would shake, tremble. I’d be sweaty and hot and cold and shivering, all at once. I sometimes shivered so hard it felt difficult to speak to the judge, my lips stiff with numbness. Fear shows in strange ways.

When I argued the oral argument for my Appellate remand, I walked into the courtroom and remember admiring the paintings on the wall, reminiscent of Renaissance European cathedrals, thick marble columns and towering arches. The judges, three of them, all sat on raised platforms, at least six feet above me. I remember thinking then, in that moment, how grateful I was that I had been in courtrooms dozens of times, because the marble columns read like facades and the creaks that whined under the judges feet reminded me of whose labor built the systems. I did not feel afraid. Not anymore.

Today, I realized I had forgotten about booking. About the long hours of waiting to be processed into jail. But then I walked into the booking room and immediately remembered, with all of my body, what the room used to feel like, a decade ago. But today, it didn’t feel like that. It wasn’t huge and cold and frightening. It was bureaucratic and gray and boring. Contained.

But he was in a huge room, even though I was standing in front of him in a small room. His head drooped downward so muchso that he did seem small to me, despite his size. He seemed tiny and frail and weak. Weak in the way that, if I pushed on his shoulder with one of my fingers, he might evaporate into thin air.

I said his name and it felt like I was hollering into a cave.

I saw it in that mirror in the moment he briefly looked up at me. We made eye contact only for a moment, but his eyes were my mirror. I could see that the upper part of his body wasn’t melted gooey rice Krispy treats gone wrong, or a drip castle supersaturated with water, or a pile of kinetic sand.

It was his internal world collapsing under shame, and shame was the only thing holding shape in his skin. Everything else inside had melted. Kind of like how a caterpillar’s body partially liquifies inside a cocoon. This man’s body in front of me was a cocoon, and inside, was dissolved tissues, nutrient rich but liquid soft. Like the animal that exists after caterpillar and before butterfly, this man stood before me with his respiratory system in tact, his nervous system on fire, his digestive system raging, but everything else had turned to a primordial jelly. I was seeing it right before my eyes, in real time: a live battle between shame and Self, with shame winning through force and strength.

I saw myself, but not the same me I would see if I looked in a mirror. It was the me I used to be. The one that barely crawled away alive. The one that, at one point, would have rather died than to admit I had been reckless and would forever be responsible for the loss of a human life. It was the me who saw no way out, the one who begged Death to come. I wrote love letters to Death as if making love in that way would draw her nearer. Death seemed preferable to that structure of shame I was trapped in.  It felt like I could not breathe. It felt like I was not human. Like I didn’t deserve the space I took up.

            After I realized that, no matter how soft my words were, no matter how much hope I filled into each word, he still could not hear me, I stopped talking. I remembered all the voices I couldn’t hear, a decade ago. The family members who weren’t wrong but I was angry at them anyway. The people assessing me who I was convinced were in cahoots with my abuser so of course I wouldn’t share anything with them. The walls, the buildings. The cells. They had all seemed so large and formidable when my spine had been turned into slime under the weight of shame.

            I wanted to hold him, cradle him like a child and tell him, “There there, you’ll get through this.” I wished I could transfer vignettes of memories I’ve collected over the years. It would be like a string of memories that had, for years, dimmed to black and white horror films, and then, slowly, color started returning. It wasn’t in a dramatic, Wizard of Oz sort of way but rather slow and unnoticeable in the way that one day nothing is there and the next something green has emerged from the soil. It was there all along and yet there was something alchemal needed, something to do with time and gravity and love, that had to happen in order for me to find my spine and my voice and my Self again. The vignettes from the past few years are so saturated in rich colors that it almost seems selfish to have so much richness in my life. So much structure build, not on shame but on foundations I’ve crafted myself. I feel liberated and free like I can fly anywhere I want. I wish I could show him how beautiful it will get, once he dares to believe, even for just one moment, that he’s worth all that richness he deserves. But it’s not time yet.

            All I could do was look at the mirror and appreciate the reflection I saw within myself, knowing all I can offer him now is hope.