Piece originally appeared in Amator // Issue: Waiting in September 2017
Brandon has been my pen pal on death row for three years. Each of his letters echoes this general tone and is characterized by a series of sentence fragments, progressively more despondent than the last, often comically so:
I look out for these nuggets of opinion, of humor and glimpses of his personality. But more often than not, his letters consist of “updates” on his case. And I put the quotes there because, despite being spread out by a month or so, they’re painfully repetitive and circular and I don’t think he even notices:
It’s exhausting to watch him struggle to interpret the progression of his case as it unfolds outside his cell and his control. He lives in a perpetual waiting room. He’s waiting too while the doctor decides whether to kill him or not. And so, unsurprisingly, it paralyzes him.
It affects how he perceives time.
Since entering prison over 10 years ago, he has earned 4 degrees, watched his grand-daughter learn the ABCs, and—to the horror of my parents–he married one of his pen pals. He’s learning to live while waiting to learn if he’ll live. Brandon seems to manage to grab onto pieces of life from within his 12x12 plot of earth, his waiting room.
