Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror.