A letter from a very dark place

The following is a letter to be shared with my readers:

“I am just a nobody trying to warn anybody about this place that I am in.
The time in my life that I so recklessly threw away I am now forced to use positively in a negative situation. Nobody knows how bad I truly feel and to know that the only person that tried to help me, in return, I only hurt (which was my mother). When all this happened to me and I saw that this time there was no way out, then and only then did I see that I was not the so-called man I proclaimed to be in the streets, because secretly the man wanted his mother. My boys, guns, drugs, and money — all the things that made me, only caved me. (But it was all my choice) Mrs. Mitchell, when my mother explained to me about what you were doing and she wanted me to write you. I first asked her why and told her that nobody would listen. Hundreds of young men arrive to prisons every day and they won’t listen to their parents, teachers, programs, church, or any ex-convicts who try to warn them every day. I know this first-hand because I was one of them, but after I had finished talking with her I kept hearing her voice saying, “Son, if your words don’t reach but one person then that’s one person you have helped.” Another reason I decided to write is that when I first came to prison I later figured out that I was doing the same thing I was doing on the streets: listening to those who only struggle through life, but now I am learning to listen to survivors of life. Mrs. Mitchell, I am only twenty years old and I will be in prison until I am forty-something without a chance of parole. I have a fifteen-month-old son in which I will never have a chance to do a lot of things with while he is growing up. I also have a fifteen-year-old brother making a lot of the same mistakes I made (he also thinks he is smarter than me) and I too can remember thinking that I was smarter than someone else. Although this is nothing funny, sometimes I have to shake my head and just laugh, because now I want to read, now I want to write, and now I want to get my GED. Now I want to go to church, now I want to read the Bible, and now I am finding out I have skills to do things that I didn’t know I had. Well Mrs. Mitchell, it’s about time for me to close because soon it will be lights-out, because now I also have a curfew in which I must meet. So if this letter reaches you and you decide to use it, if nothing else I’ve said helps then I hope that this will. Young men, why come to prison to get rehabilitations to be able to one day fit into society when society already gives rehabilitation as a free man?”

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This is the letter from the young man in which I stated in last week’s article that I would let it be known what he had to say. However, I did skip around a lot of things. The words that captured me most are written. There is no need for me to comment because just as his life is his choice, his words were also his choice. That’s something we all have right — choice!

Pamela Mitchell is a columnist for The Progressive Journal and lives in Pageland.