Ann Casapini
What Is in Front of Him
These days my brother has time to write six-page letters to our mother, to me, to my sisters, and our cousins every month, every birthday, every holiday. He has time to read any and every book he can find.
He tells me he does things he's never had time to do before. He sews buttons and tears on his khakis. He writes term papers for young men who are trying to complete their high school equivalency. He even reads the weekend NY Times from the front page to the last.
In contrast, I am always running somewhere: balancing work, parenting and caregiving for my elderly mother. My newspaper delivery often stays unopened, wrapped in its blue plastic bag. My weekends are busy with teaching yoga, driving my son to soccer games, and preparing meals for the week ahead. And I can't even remember the last book I read.
My brother says he fills time walking for a couple hours a day, doing some landscaping, working out, or maybe playing the occasional game of chess.
He has so much time, he tells me that he stares at the ceiling for hours on end and watches the shadows shift as the sun moves. He watches spiders weave their webs, ants create their homes in the grass, birds build their nests. So much time he writes down lyrics to every song he’s ever known.
While I keep examining our childhood looking for some explanation of how he got here today, my brother has become skilled at not thinking about the past. I continue to wonder, was his brain damaged when he was working at the bowling alley? That time he reset the pins and a bowling ball fell on his head? Was it a lack of connection to our father who was old enough to be our grandfather? Was it that they never got to toss a football to each other? Did it have anything to do with our mother's hoarding? Could there be mental illness in our genes?
But my brother doesn't seem to care about cause and effect. His life as an electronics technician, mountain biker, nature lover and dog owner is over.
Since he has nowhere to go, he now never hurries. Relatives live many hours away; he doesn’t expect visitors. There is no one he wants to talk to. He goes for months without saying more than “Yes, Sir,” “No, Sir,” and “Present,” at count three times a day.
At the beginning of his time at the Fairton Prison he told me he worried constantly: Will I be abused here? Become forever dependent here? Get sick and die here?
Now after five years in, he says he just concentrates on what is in front of him. His instant coffee, his three inch pencil, his piece of cardboard acting as his desk. His possessions are distilled down to a shared plastic molded chair, a two inch horsehair mattress, and a one-foot by three-foot locker, into which he has taped four photographs of our family.
He tells me he’s trained himself to deal with time in increments of sixty seconds.
Individual moments he can get through. He gave up struggling against the guards. Stopped doing hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions. Abandoned filing forms to fight for his rights.
Moment-to-moment, he strings out his days and weeks and months and years. He says he's now resigned to do his time. Unlike me who struggles to accept the fact that my brother is actually sentenced to twenty-one years. Now he seems almost zen-like (or zombie-like) in his words and actions. Unlike me who is raging against our country's unfair mandatory minimum laws. I keep working to pay my mortgage. I keep chauffeuring my eighty-two year old mother to all her doctor appointments. I keep writing and calling my representatives hoping to change these laws.
He insists, You can get through one minute of anything. I don't believe him. How does he deal with sharing an 8 x12 space with two obese strangers? Or spreading his butt cheeks during strip searches? Or punishments of solitary confinement with no windows and only an hour a day out of that cell?
Lately my brother tells me he sleeps many hours a day. Unlike me, who isn't sleeping well at all because I am worrying my brother might simply give up completely one day and just kill himself.
Ann Casapini has been a yoga and meditation instructor since 1995. She also loves to write, sing and dance salsa! She has been published in Crack the Spine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Dunes Review, The Sun, Awakened Voices Blog: The Nightingale, Medusa’s Laugh Press: Microtext Anthology 3, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Scablands Books: Weird Sisters, and The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: A collective storytelling project. Ann is a repeat contributor to both Read650.org and Military Experience & the Arts’ on-line journal: As You Were. She was a finalist in the 2017 TSR Short, Short Fiction contest (The Southhampton Review) and received an Honorable Mention in The Westchester Review 2016 Flash Fiction contest. Ann studies writing with Steve Lewis and lives in Tuckahoe, NY. Visit Ann's website: https://www.anncasapini.com/