The inevitable monotony of another day decays your precious time, alongside your brain cells as you get trapped listening to those who surround you once again. The walls seem to grow thicker as the sun rises each day. Your patience is as thin as it’s ever been and your tolerance even slimmer. Preparing yourself for another ten and half hours straight of “how are you”, “another day in paradise”, “living the dream”, “good, how are you?”, “I’m alive”, “yeah okay”, “MUSTER”, “THEY’RE COMING!”, “roll your trouser legs down”, “answer when you hear your name”, and “meal service is now available”.

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The deafening PA system bing-bonging at regular intervals, piercing your eardrums with exclamations of “ATTENTION! Blah blah blah, I SAY AGAIN, blah blah blah”.

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Name after name, hour after hour, minute after minute of constant repetition and meaningless niceties.

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Useless small talk and unwarranted bragging about past activities echoing around you on every side. All around you are people sitting about in groups just wasting as much time as they can doing absolutely nothing useful before the final call rings…“ALL INMATES TO RETURN TO THEIR UNITS FOR MUSTER AND COUNT”.

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Then the day is through, and everyone retreats to their cells, or their units if they have progressed through the system far enough as not to get locked in cages overnight. Nearly every single one of them sits and watches pointless crap on a small box in their cells or if they are lucky, the larger one in their common area until their eyes feel heavy, and their minds have grown even more numb. Then, sleep away a few hours before they have the privilege of starting the EXACT same day again tomorrow, over and over. No end is in sight.

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You feel such a sense of disconnect from everything, not only on the outside of here, but in here as well. It seems to grow every day you spend here as new hordes of prisoners come and go, only a miniscule amount of the same faces become regular signs. The screws rarely cycle in and out, but they become less human every day without fail anyway. Eventually, you stop seeing them as people so much and instead they become just like some rusty cogs, in a nearly broken-down machine.

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Questions fill your mind, all the “what ifs” of the past and the “what will be” of the future swirling themselves into an impossibly tangled knot within your brain. “When?” is the truly complicated one however. It’s all guessing and anxiety, both around being here and around getting out simultaneously.

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There comes a point where you don’t even have energy to disassociate left within you anymore, months ago it seemed to suddenly evade your grasp. Now you’re stuck in a panicked state, subjected to the full force of your own emotions swirling and twisting up from the very tip of your cold toes, into your knotted gut, shivering up the length of your spine and flooding into your heavy, overflowing skull. The full elation you feel when you’re soaring upwards one hour measures equally to the overbearing weight that drags you down to the next.

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For someone who is acclimatised to bare nothingness, of which was their own creation, these sudden rushes of emotion are free to take hold of you completely and throw you in whichever direction they please. You feel out of control entirely and as a result, fear starts to fill every fibre of your being. Feeling out of control of yourself and never sure how you may react from one moment to the next.

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You’ve never felt like this before; over time your environment becomes less foreign to you than your own self does. Now a stranger to yourself just as much as you are to the next fresh face who stumbles through the prison gates, wondering what their days will be filled with here.

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Someone on the outside looking in couldn’t possibly fathom this existence unless they have lived here before. But if anyone would like to try, simply start reading this again from the first line and when you reach the last one, go again. Repeat again for the entire day tomorrow and the next day, then every day after that. Nothing will change, just as nothing changes in here either. In (give or take) 16 months, maybe it’ll start to seem as monotonous as everything else here.