Tuesday, September 8, 2015

William Myrl; Letters to No One (19)

Dear No One,

I’m writing you a letter because there’s nothing else I feel like doing. I wasted the morning playing Earthworm’s DnD game. Once I stopped running mine, he and Eor took it upon themselves to keep the legacy alive. They guilted me into making a character and I regret it already. It isn’t a terribly constructive way to spend my time.

Back in the cell by 10:30 I lay down and brooded for the better part of an hour. Either the morning or the game put me in a negative mood. The Doc put in to up my Wellbutrin but that hasn’t gotten through to the pill line yet. I didn’t ask him to, but he was probably on point. He is a very perceptive person. Psychology cannot always be wrong. The names of the last three medical students slipped my mind, and I am annoyed at myself for that.

Limitations are the source of my malaise. Living incarcerated is the art of distracting ourselves from our impotencies. For example, I won’t be able to kiss another girl until I’m in my forties, but I get to watch CNN and nineteen other equally captivating channels until then. The highest salary I can attain is about a half dollar an hour, but I don’t have any bills and I can sleep ANYTIME I WANT.

I can’t be with my family, but I can squat 315 and probably more soon. I have benefits, advantages that other people in this situation do not. Many inmates beg or demand more money from relatives than I do. But only I have chivvied my people into setting up a website and querying agents for me, as far as I know.

I read once that when you buy a lottery ticket what you are actually buying is the right to dream pleasantly. So all that my family does for me, all that I draw and all that I can write may be no more than that; a pleasant dream and a distraction from the reality that I cannot bodily escape. Even if Dragon’s Summer is picked up by an agency and they sell it to a publisher for some great sum, it still won’t send me home.

It would be a vindication of sorts. It would add something onto the end of my biographical byline other than bipolar bank robber and high school dropout. It would be a financial boon for me and mine, and likely a host of other positive things. Yet I would still be here. I wouldn’t get to kiss the girl. And I would have to find another pleasant dream.

Yours,

William Myrl (19)

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