I’ve never doubted that leaving my job in the prison was the
right choice, even though it meant leaving England too. I had dinner with a friend last night
and he asked me what it was about that country I loved so much and as many
times as I’ve been asked that question, I’ve never been able to answer. I have no words for it, but it was there in every breath I took,
every rainy day, every blade of grass and overgrown ivy and thatched roof and
winding one lane road. It was the only place I never felt like a stranger even
when I didn’t know a single person.
Even when I was scared and so darkly, deeply unhappy, I felt
at home there. Even after five years, it still strikes me as incredibly unfair
that everything I loved about that place and everything that was wrong were so
entwined that I had to give up one in order to escape the other.
***
It’s impossible for me to think of the last time I left the
prison without remembering the first time I went in. That first day was in April 2006, and I was there to
interview for the position of Library Manager. I set my bag in a tub on a conveyer belt that fed into an
x-ray machine, and I stepped through metal detectors. I stood with my arms out
while a woman in a uniform ran her hands down my sides, around my back, across
my stomach and down my legs. I stiffened and she told me if I got the job this
routine would eventually feel normal. She was right, but getting used something
isn’t the same as being comfortable.
After passing through a set of double sliding doors, I was
met by an officer who worked in the library. He gave me a tour of the prison,
and because it was lunchtime and the inmates were locked up, he took me everywhere
-- through the workshops, the
healthcare center, onto one of the wings. He even locked me in an empty cell in
the segregation unit because I had arrived so early for the interview, he
didn’t know what else to do with me. He was patient and answered all my
questions, and when I told him I was used to criminals because my dad was a
lawyer, he didn’t shake his head or call me naive. After I got the job, he
would often do both of those things.
I don’t remember going in the last time, but I remember
every step I took on the way out.
I remember looking at the clock. And then Jane, the officer I hired to
work in the library after the first one transferred, said “Let’s go let’s go let’s
go.” She wanted me out fast -- too
fast to think and get emotional and cause a scene because there was no crying
in the library. That’s a rule I broke only twice in the four years I was there,
both times early on, before I found other unhealthier ways to cope.
“This is it, then,” I said to Jane. I gathered my stuff and
we locked the door to the library. I looked back through the unbreakable wired
glass one last time, at the shelves I had picked out from a catalog, and the
books and music CDs and DVDs I filled them with, and the light matte blue I’d painted
the walls.
When we reached what is known as the sterile area (where the
prisoners were not allowed), I paused and said, “Wait. Am I supposed to turn in
my ID?” I wish I hadn’t asked that question. I could have taken it with me.
What would they have done? I was leaving the country; they wouldn’t have been
able to find me. But I said it, so we detoured into the Security Office and I
handed in the badge with my picture on it, taken the first week I worked there,
when my hair was so short it barely reached my chin.
In the gatehouse, I dropped my keys through a chute, and
bent down to speak through the opening. “I’m not coming back,” I said so that the
officer on the other side of the thick glass window wouldn’t exchange them for a
metal disc imprinted with a corresponding key number, which is what would have
happened on any other day.
***
Five years ago today, I walked out of the prison for the
last time. I checked my journals from 2010 but I didn’t write that day. The
nearest entry is almost a month earlier, after I’d made the decision to leave,
but before I understood what I was giving up. I was unhappy. I’d been unhappy for a long time. My happiness
(or lack thereof) is not usually a factor in my writing, but most of my last
year there went unrecorded. I’m sorry about that now, but the gaps between
entries have as much meaning as the pages I filled before and after. The lost
time reminds me that leaving was the right choice.
But even though I didn’t write about that, I remember.
***
The first set of doors slid open and Jane put her hand on my
back to push me through. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go” she said again. I walked
through the second sliding doors into the lobby, and then finally through the
front door. I thought about the first time again. Looking up, the twenty-foot walls surrounding the prison
seemed to extend forever in each direction.
I wanted to take a moment, but I didn’t know what to do with
it.
So I just kept going.
