Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

feeling as if I’m on the verge of something huge to dread at the thought of one more round of prayer.
    Same as yesterday. All work and no joy in the ritual. I’m hoping for a second wind. I did about twenty minutes of hatha yoga asanas today to loosen up. I find that once I begin the HGA ritual it’s very pleasant. There’s something about it that has a timeless quality. It’s just the thought of beginning that I dread. I look at it as a child does homework.
    There is no angel. There is nothing.
    Everything is fractured, the pieces of everything come together, collide, then move away to collide again.
    There is no such thing as magick.
    I have lost all faith, lost all belief. I teeter on the edge of hopelessness. Everything is a fight, and I’m so tired. I’m so tired of struggling; I want to scream until I’m gargling my own blood.
    The dreams are coming fast and fierce. Dreams of freedom. It hurts so much to wake up.
    Time is coming apart for me. At some moments I can no longer feel a past, any past, trailing behind me like a snakeskin. At other moments it feels like the past is all that’s real. Today I was two people, one laughing at the other.
    The summer is on me like a ghost. I’d cry with longing if it weren’t so pointless.
    Nothing makes any sense. There doesn’t seem to be any point in trying. Everything falls apart. I’ll be thirty-two years old exactly six months from today.
    My exhaustion is beyond bone-deep. It has seeped into my soul, and every day it robs me of a little more of what I once was. Of what I was meant to be. There is no rest here, and there is no life. When I try to look ahead the light seems a little farther away each day. There is despair on my breath and no savior in sight. They say it’s only death if you accept it, but more and more these days I’m feeling like I don’t have a choice. I keep saying to myself, “I will not stop. I will not stop.” If for no other reason than that I will it to be so. If everything else fails, I will keep moving ahead on willpower alone. There has to be some magick in something, somewhere.
    It used to be that a certain wrongness danced across the ocean’s surface, crackling like chain lightning. Now the despair is more subtle, sinking silently beneath the waves and coming to rest in dark and poisonous places. The surface becomes pallid and exudes a sick, gray, greasy feeling that eventually drives you mad. It’s an endless cycle that breeds a never-ending supply of frustration. Its heartache is the color of lead, and nothing in the world can heal it.
    Summer makes me suicidal. It sucks all the magick out of life, and even sleeping becomes an exercise in fruitless brutality. I cannot comprehend what is in the souls who await this misery. Nothing worthwhile can survive the heat. The birds and the bees are harbingers of hell, ushering in a season of disease. There is nothing in these months that speaks to me. It conspires to keep me from ever reaching home.
    If you were to go down the line and ask each man what it is that he hates most about prison, you’d probably come up with a different answer for nearly every person asked. Some things are universal, like not being able to go out at night and see the stars, or not being able to be with your family—but each person also has his own pet peeves. For me they are the mosquitoes and the sleep deprivation.
    It’s better here at Varner, but Tucker was hell where the mosquitoes were concerned. Tucker was surrounded by fields on all sides, and there’s one crop or another growing as long as it’s warm enough. The entire ground is like one giant mosquito hatchery. If you think you know what a swarm of mosquitoes is like just because you’ve been camping or sat in the backyard on a summer night, then you’re badly mistaken. I’ve seen entire walls covered by blankets of mosquitoes. Every time you take a step, a cloud of them rises from the ground.
    I’ve literally cried in frustration more than once because the mosquitoes were such a torment. My hands have been bitten so many times they’ve become swollen and miserable. The skin on my knuckles was so red and tight that my fingers looked like sausages. You have to keep moving because if you are still they land all over you. Every year the walls look like abstract paintings because of the blood spots from the smashed mosquitoes. You can’t rest because they buzz in your ears, bite your lips and eyelids, and drive you to the edge of a