Travesty

Prologue- To Whomever Cares to Read

To Whomever Cares to Read:

It's funny how people forget about you once you've been thrown into a steel cage for the rest of your life. No one sends me letters like they used to. My family rarely visits. I've even forgotten myself. How did I act before all this happened to me? I can't remember. Maybe I was normal. Maybe I had potential. Maybe... Maybe...

My "potential" is no more, though; all that waits for me is death. It's a punishment I don't even deserve. I never touched Tanya Tachibana, let alone stabbed her forty-something times. I barely knew her! It's a crime of passion when someone continues to drive a knife into someone for who-knows-how-long. How could I be passionate about murdering a complete stranger? I'd have to be completely insane to do something like that. And let me tell you; if I'm not mentally stable, it's because of the five years I've sat in this hell known as death row.

This place... It's torture. At best, I'm out of my cell for an hour. An hour! But after that precious time ticks away, I'm forced to return to this... This... This absolute hell. Completely isolated, a hard, narrow bed, a steel toilet, and white walls. Those damn white walls. They're the worst part of the whole cell. Every minute I spend looking up at the white ceiling or at those damn white walls, they seem to move closer, and closer, and closer until I'm suffocating, gasping for relief.

Yet that relief I need... It'll take a miracle for me to be able to feel it. Out. That's all I want. I want this whole situation to be over with, for me to be released from my prison, from my sentence. But, as I said, it will take a miracle for that to happen. What can I say? The evidence they needed was there. I don't know how it got there, but it did. Hard proof. No matter how many times I said it was planted, they never believed me. After all, isn't that what any stupid, amateur killer would say? But I'm not a monster that slaughters, so how was I to know?

I don’t know when I’m scheduled to die. Within the next decade, I know that much. It’s terrifying, you know. I mean, everyone knows they’ll die eventually. But to know it’s so close… It’s awful. What gives humans the right to act as a deity? It just… I just don’t want to die. I can’t act like the hardened killers that surround me and accept my death. How can I? I’m not one of them. I’m not a monster.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Gray

Written on October 14th, 2009