Microstory 2286: Cathartic to Go Out Alone

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I did a bad thing yesterday; I escaped. I left a note, and my phone was on my person at all times, but everyone was still worried about me. I knew they would be, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I know it’s not the same thing, but my life has felt so stifling these days, like I’m on house arrest. I wanted to be free, so I took the car for a drive. I found a small cemetery pretty far outside of town, and just sat there on one of the stone benches in the freezing cold. I’ve always felt rather comfortable in cemeteries, probably because there usually aren’t very many other people around. They make most people sad at best, and uncomfortable at worst. I go there to think, but also to peruse the headstones. I like to see all the different designs that they carve into them, and to note how many are grouped in families. I have an obsession with time, as you know, so I also look for the oldest grave, and do mental math on people’s lifetimes. Sometimes it really is sad, like when the year of death is the same as the year of birth. It was cathartic to go out alone, even though I really wasn’t supposed to. I was feeling so trapped, but it was still wrong of me, and I received a proper scolding from my security firm. I’m just still not used to being so attached and dependent on others. I mean, that’s not really true, is it? My life has always been a mess. I’ve always relied on others. Too much, truthfully. Money was meant to change that about me, but it’s only made it worse. Man, if I can’t ever go back home, it might be worth it just to escape this world, and start over fresh somewhere else. What’s that, you say? My writing? How’s my writing going? Does it help? No. It’s a nothing burger, as the saying goes. I’m feeling very unmotivated to write anything; fact or fiction. I think I’m probably gonna give up again.

Microstory 2134: All a Big Trade-off

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I’m back home, even though I’ve not yet recovered from my infection. My lawyer argued to the judge that it was possible that the food I was given in the prison was potentially poisoned, and my distaste for it was not simply the result of another symptom of the fungus. This would be a reach, as I’m sure you’re assuming, except that this facility has a suspiciously deep history with poison. There have been other cases that were not ambiguous, and which involved guards in more than one instance. That doesn’t prove that I was indeed poisoned, because they couldn’t pinpoint anything in my body, but that was enough to get me a compassionate release. I’m obviously not completely free. I still can’t leave my apartment, and since I can’t be monitored around the clock anymore, I can’t go back to jail this weekend for my normal two-day stint. This is a complicated situation, because skipping a weekend comes with an automatic incursion of an extra 64 hours. Here’s the math. I was originally sentenced to 1000 hours. I’m scheduled to go inside at 18:00 every Friday, and come out at 18:00 on Sunday. That’s 48 hours each time. Multiply that by 20, and you get 960 hours. That means on the 21st weekend, I could have left at 10:00 on Sunday. But now I’m up to 1064 total. So it’s more than just one additional weekend. After that, I still have an extra eight hours to take care of during a 23rd weekend. And this will keep happening each time I have to push it back, even if it’s not my fault. This is just how the law works. The judge is not at liberty to make any sort of exception due to my illness. That’s probably for the best, or people would be calling in sick when they’re not, just like they do when they don’t want to go to work, or perhaps more commonly, school. My time in house arrest doesn’t count towards my quota. My time in the prison medical ward, while it was supposed to last for seven days, only covered the original 48 hours that I owed. It wasn’t supposed to last more than a week either way. It’s all a big trade-off, but I would still say that I’m glad to be back here, even with this ankle monitor. I have more space to move around, I have better internet, and I eat whatever I want. Plus, I’m still making my own hours, which gives me extra time to sleep in my nice and comfortable bed. In the prison, I found that I could only work during certain times, or the connection was excruciatingly slow. That often meant getting up in the middle of the night, and I’m not about that.