Time Keeps on Slippin...

My world trembled a little bit when I heard the first words come out of good old Wayne’s mouth, 25 to life. The next words from God in heaven were “Stayed”. On and on it went until for what seemed like hours. On the news that night I was told by pretty little reporters that I could be expected to see freedom once again anywhere from 5 to 25 years. Not one was accurate about how much time I would spend in the big house. Hell, as I sit here writing this remembering what it felt like to have my time given to me, the relief I felt that I could finally get moving toward my future whatever that was going to be.
For the past year and 9 months I had seen amazingly great and amazingly horrible reactions to the issuance of time. Some women came back onto the module and they were happy beyond measure that their attorney had found some loop hole and they were being released that night. Others, one red head in particular was so destroyed by her sentence of thirty days that, that evening when we had been released for day room. She walked up to the top tier, almost directly over the cop station, climbed over the rail, and jumped trying to kill herself. I was on the top tier on the other side of the module and was too far away to get to her to stop her and could only watch. Jumping off the tier was a quick trip to the hospital, pain meds and escape from their current reality. Of all the women who used the leap of the tier as their method to escape their time not one of them succeeded. They simply added a broken back of broken feet to the already complicated situation. Also they usually went to the psych ward which was even more restrictive than E module, causing their movements to be scrutinized even more, less freedom.