I sat on the floor and folded each napkin as small as it could go. Then I used the pen I had pocketed from Mitch’s last visit to work a hole in the mattress and stuffed each one inside.

It was difficult getting to sleep that night on top of all those dreams, all those wishes, all that torment. It seemed like there was no room in the bed for my body, certainly not for my own thoughts. Whatever I did next was going to be bigger than me. It had to be, for all of us. And so maybe these messages were gifts after all. Because in a way, they started delivering me back to myself.

More napkins appeared over the next few days. I realized that the inmates weren’t saving their words just for me, that they had a way of communicating with one another as well. It was a small mercy, to have community even in the darkest of prisons. I collected the messages, saying thank you for each one, and carried them back to my mattress depository. I didn’t read them all; I couldn’t. Some were for family members, a few were for the Creator, and more than one read like a diary. They were written in mustard, in soup, sometimes in blood. They used shorthand, and some were in different languages. These felt like prayers, even if they just recounted the day. That was real resistance, small and impactful. The words existed even now. I believed they always would, even if we didn’t. Because the potential of us was in those nouns and verbs, the belief that we could exist, that we had before and would again. Soon there were so many napkins under me that it was like sleeping in a chapel.

After a while, I grew used to the routine: when I’d be met in the hall, the timing of my showers, the menu that would be prepared. I came to expect the sneers and the avoidance, found ways to recognize the kitchen staff by their posture, or their ability to grow facial hair, or the way they put a hand on the small of their back as the day trudged forward toward dinnertime. I knew that twice a week, I had to check in with Agent Mellin to deliver details about the hardship of my time in the woods and that twice a week, Mitch would swing by to sit in my room and talk about his time in the Program and how amazing it all was. It was like listening to the most boring story ever told, but like a TV show when you only have one channel, I got used to it and even started to look forward to the installments.

Any break in the routine became alarming. And so the day I came back from my afternoon shift in the kitchen to find Watchmen tossing the rooms, I almost swallowed my tongue.

There is an excruciating moment when you are confronted with an emergency—an ambulance on your street, or ominous smoke somewhere up ahead—when your body and your mind fight each other. Do you speed up or slow down? How fast do you really want to know what’s wrong? How long can you avoid the inevitable? The impulse to do both brought me to my open door at the same pace I usually walked, which in hindsight was probably for the best.