Last night, I sat, outside, on a warm Manchester evening, the sun had set, and as I held my wifes hand, I looked up and saw the imposing skyline silouette of Manchester Minshull Crown Court looking back at me. The juxtaposition istion of that building sitting like a spectre of a past life, overshadowed by rainbows a-plenty and the competitive music barrage from every bar dotted down canal street.
That building will haunt the paths I walk through the city forever, and I often change my route if I find myself in close proximity to it. Just looking at it makes me lose my breath. The Victorian and draconian high walls, with the closing gates where the prison vans lurk. Just thinking about it makes me feel sick.
So you can imagine the confusion within me looking over at the building that saw me lose my freedom and disappear into the winters night, whilst sitting and laughing with the people who love me most.
And it occurred to me, I left my life, like a soul leaves a body. I left it.
And it's only recently I came back to it, and fortunately for me, it was still here waiting for me, but it was only ever waiting for me. Not the shadow or spectre of who I was that came home from prison.
I caught a glimpse of myself a few days ago, on a microsoft teams call, the way we all do, we see our little faces in little boxes, and it was like the Fran I lost, and had been waiting for, came home.
I was chatting away in teacher mode, waxing lyrical about coding, exhilerating a new cohort of students, and I felt altogether myself, no missing pieces.
Bit by bit, prison eroded the person I had become, the strength, pride, resilience I had made my whole, the woman I had become to overcome the person who I was before.
It was a short period of time, relative to the time I have no been home, but day by day, it took something. Not just freedom. Pieces of me. That pride, that strength, that resilience, evaporated, for every day I was outside of my life and I hadn't realised how little of me was left until I compared the person I was before and after.
When I came home from prison, I was selfish, I was souless, I was focused on all of the wrong things, building my new house on sand, with no foundations. With no depth. No purpose.
The echoes of who I was, lingered. And those around me tried to pull me back, wake me up, remind me I was home and home was all I ever needed - but in a very Fran obstinate way, I knew better.
Prison is a strange place, where you can be your purest self but daren't be, because it's a place where vunerablity is a dangerous thing. You open yourself up and don't realise the danger you've put yourself in and you create and forge bonds of foreverness in some misguided notion of solidarity and connectivity. It's nothing more than a survival mechanism. Prison creates an unhealthy codependence and erodes reality. It creates a selfish souless bubble where the person you were once, exists in a warped version and you feel like you have it all figured out, you know who you are now, who you need to be on the other side, because you go to prison feeling like you have to change, you have to be more, be better, because otherwise, what was it all for?
I spent days and nights lamenting my conscience, my choices, myself. My punishment has always been of my own making, but prison exacerbates our ability to destroy our sense of self. It dehumanises you and the relationships you build, the relationships you have.
And somehow, we are supposed to leave rehabilitated, reformatted, reinvigorated for life after?
The woman prison made me, and the woman I allowed myself to become, for the sake of punishment and penance, set me back a year.
I lost a year of my life to jail, I lost nearly as much trying to regain my sense of self, my purpose, my soul, my relationships.
But I spent a weekend with the people I love the most and who love me unconditionally, the people who wrote to me, called me, let me know I was in their thoughts and hearts every single day I was away, and I held their hands, danced like the sun wouldn't come up, drank more beer than any 35 year old woman should.
We celebrated pride, we celebrated love. We celebrated me being home. And I felt it.
I lost time, I lost myself, but thank god for patience, persistence and the wonder of friendship and real life.
Prison is a bad dream, and I woke up.
And I've never felt more free.
