Prisoner in My own Mind

By Nick Williams: A ‘Just Blog’ Competition Entry

I am a prisoner in my own mind. I am in a prison in my mind and I can’t get out. I don’t look like I’m in prison, but I am. I might look as if I’m at liberty, but I’m not. I’m doing time. I’m doing SERIOUS time. I’m a lifer – I’m not getting any remission, I’m not getting any time off for good behaviour. I’m not eligible for parole. I am a prisoner! I am a prisoner in my own head, a prisoner in my own tight little mind. I know I’m repeating myself but that’s what it’s like when you’re stuck in your head, when you’re a prisoner in your own mind. It’s like I’m in solitary, in an isolation cell. Words just keep going around and around. Thoughts just keep going around and around and around. Forever repeating. Bouncing off the walls and then bouncing back again almost instantaneously. That’s because there’s no space in the narrow little prison cell of my mind. No space for anything. Anything I think comes right back at me like an echo. All my thoughts are echoes of earlier thoughts. They’re all echoes – echoes of something no one can remember. Echoes of something no one even cared about the first time around! My thoughts are infinitely recycled, infinitely reiterated. They may not be very much but they’re all I’ve got. They may not be very much but I’m getting the use out of them. Whatever use that is. Maybe no use. It’s just all mental static at this stage. Empty reverberations, pretending to be thoughts. There’s nothing else for me to be doing though, locked up here in the tight little prison cell of my mind. I’ve only got a few thoughts and I have to keep thinking them, thinking them, thinking them. Over and over again in the privacy of my own mind. In case I missed something. In case I missed something a few million times. It’s like squeezing very old oranges, trying to get a bit of juice out of them. A bit of juice I might have missed before. Dried up old oranges. Mummified oranges. Desiccated husks of oranges. Putting them through the machine trying to get a drop of precious live-giving juice out of them. By some miracle. I have to do this to try to stay sane. I don’t have any other option. I have to do this because I’m a prisoner in my own mind…