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My tense muscles finally relax after the hot water runs over my body and I let out a sigh. This has been a very tough week and I am absolutely exhausted. What exhausts me even more is the fact that this was just the first week of a few months. How am I even supposed to survive that? Just the thought of going back to that place makes me anxious, let alone when I am in there. I let out another sigh and try to enjoy the warmth of the water.
Today is Sunday, my only day off. Because of the fact that the past week was the first week of my internship, I decided on sleeping at home. This week I'll try to vary where I sleep, depending on the time of my first conversations. There's actually a department in the prison with bedrooms for the guards and my father arranged one for me, next to his spare bedroom. He sleeps there most of the time, sometimes he comes back home for a night or two. I could move out because I'm not a teen anymore but I simply do not have the money to rent a small apartment, even if I'd split it with my best friend.
Reed has been very helpful the entire week. I feel quite comfortable around him, knowing that he kind of understands me and really tries to help me function as a therapist. I truly feel like a rookie, but time will hopefully make me gain experience. That's the entire point of throwing myself into deep waters.
Kimberly has been kind, but her exaggerated enthusiasm gets on my nerves most of the time. I don't even understand how she does that. After a week of observation I've realized that there's definitely something going on between her and my father. It is so obvious; it pisses me off and confuses me at the same time. I'm not pissed at her, I'm pissed that no one's able to see through the act that my father plays every single day. He's just not a good man. Him having authority as a guard literally makes no sense to me. Not at all.
Rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, I put one hand against the shower cabin, slightly leaning into it.
I don't regret my choices of trying to help the inmates, but some of them have really been giving me a hard time without any reason. By some of them, I mainly mean the one inmate that managed to give me goosebumps all over my spine, in a bad way, within the first few minutes of our first conversation.
His name is Michael Bradshaw. He's been in the same prison for ten years now, waiting in death row for a death that seems to never come. He's in his early thirties. There are a lot of allegations against him, but the main ones are murder and many cases of rape.
Mostly, the really tough and dangerous considered criminals aren't on my list, but I ask Reed for one every now and then. I want to challenge myself and see how I'm holding up and dealing with such situations. Being ambitious always seems to pay off, but this time it has just bitten me in the ass. I could always ask Reed to never have a conversation with Michael again, but even the thought of giving up makes me feel weak.
If there's one emotion I never want to feel, it's weakness.
Even though there has been all kinds of hardship, I have talked with a lot of detainees this week and some of them were very terrifying, while others were quite okay and opened up to me a lot within such a short amount of time. I've realized that a lot of detainees do actually regret what they did and want to go home, but they are also scared to go back into society again. What if they mess up, again?
