Unfiltered Chaos 🔞

2. Pull Me From This Hell

The day started too early for Lyra. She was not a morning person, but she did enjoy getting off earlier in the day. She was just glad that she was assigned a morning shift and not an evening shift. Warning her that she would often have to work twelve-hour days, she started her first day with Duri with a fake smile plastered on her face. She was great at faking her moods, especially when working. She had spent a lot of time in customer service jobs, so she had plenty of practice. She really didn't want to be in a bad mood on her first day of work, but she was still suffering from jet lag, adjusting to the time change, and she had hadn't gotten a lot of sleep due to the anxiety she had experienced the night before worrying about her first day. The thought of working with someone like Jimin made her nervous but excited. She really wasn't sure what to expect.

A lot of her on the job training that day was spent in a room away from all of the prisoners. It was boring work but necessary for everyone to comply with all of the regulations put into place. She felt like dozing off the entire time, but she wanted to do a good job. She needed to be employed, and this job paid well. She couldn't afford to lose it.

"A lot of the people in here have yet to go to trial," a prison guard named Jae informed her as they walked down the hallway outside the cell block. "Most of them aren't really dangerous. They've just had a rough life and were put into situations that most people don't understand."

She knew that people were incarcerated before their trials took place. She was just surprised to find out that so many of the people in here may have been innocent. "I get that. Not everyone has a good life growing up. People do what they need to survive."

"I'm glad to hear you say that. It's too often that some of the other guards don't show compassion towards the prisoners. They need it. Sometimes more than others. A lot of them have no one. They may get one or two visitors once a month. Some of them don't even get that. They're alone in the world."

"That sounds like a miserable life. I moved here alone, but I have people back home I can reach out to if I ever need it, and I can always make new friends."

Jae smiled at her positivity. "You're really refreshing. I hope your optimism pays off and this place doesn't harden you. It has that effect on people. Depression is pretty common in this line of work."

Lyra had no doubt that that was the case. Even throughout some of her criminal justice classes, there were students who couldn't handle the content. They withdrew into themselves and eventually quit the program altogether. It happened to her friend Luka. He told her he couldn't see himself doing that for the rest of his life. His family would suffer with his moods, but he already had a predisposition for negativity.

"I'm sure it is. And among those housed here. I haven't had a lot of interactions with them today besides just small greetings as I walked through to get to the laundry room. In the middle of the room, there was a basket in which all the prisoners had to put their dirty clothes in to be washed so that they didn't have to go to their individual cells. That was her first real assignment of the day. She knew she'd mostly be doing grunt work for the first few days, maybe longer, but she expected a little bit more excitement.

As the day went on, she was assigned to observe the prisoners in their cells. Getting to know them if she wished, but it wasn't a requirement on the first day. Learning how to interact with each prisoner was a challenge. Some of them wanted to be left alone while others craved attention. The catcalls died down within the first hour as they realized that she wasn't going to respond to them. She hadn't made her way down to Jimin's cell yet, and she wasn't sure she was ready for it. She knew she'd have to go eventually.

She had spent most of her day doing menial tasks for prisoners here and there. They couldn't leave their cells, so it was her task to run back and forth for different personal items as they came in. Everything from books to small snacks that were bought or brought in by people who cared about them on the outside. They were short-handed most of the morning, but once it hit one o'clock, a new rotation of guards came in, and there were plenty of people to go around the building.