Songs:

Heavy In Your Arms by Florence + The Machine

My Love by Sia

The grey concrete wall was layered with cracks, and ridges imperfecting its surface. The lone 18x20 window stood barracaded with bars further entrapping me from the real world. As if this isolation from my family wasn't enough. As if the skewed vision others had of my color wasn't enough. It had to worsen, they had to believe a black man like myself was capable of such blasphemy because, surely, a white man could never lie.

I've spent months living on the edge of fear and paranoia.

I've spent months worrying for my family.

I've spent months trying to make it through each day.

I've spent months wishing I had never entered that house, and let a poor white girl take advantage of my courtesy, of my gentlemanly ways to never leave a woman in need.

I've spent months damning the Ewell's to hell for causing such strife on my family, on me, and on the colored community.

I've spent months living in despair, but nothing, nothing, can compare to this. It feels like a clamp has been placed on my chest. Every breath I take it swells, and swells until it makes it impossible to breathe. I clutch at my chest with my right hand, and keel over from my crossed legs position on the cold, barren floor of my cell. Gasping, my vision begins to blur with black dots. I quickly clench my eyes and try to distract myself. With my heart speeding, and thumping unevenly, stuttering in my chest I remember...

I remember the look on Helen's face when I came home that day shaken, and pale. The horror, the crinkling of her eyes indicating she was trying not to cry. The situation so dire I couldn't even offer meaningless words like "It's okay," without breaking down myself.

I remember the day Atticus first came to me. He wasn't the man I expected, he was kind and driven. He didn't offer pretentious apologies for what was happening to me, he didn't offer insincere smiles. He spoke to the point, he looked at everything beneath the surface, he found a deeper meaning to everything., and he had the most integrity of any man I had ever met.

But even he couldn't stop them from putting me through this affliction.

I eyed the bars on the door of my cell specutively. There wasn't much space between them, but my frantic mind quickly thought of a way.

Taking a deep breath I sucked my stomach in, turning to the side and trying to squish myself through. I was never more thankful for the stress, and untouched dinners the trial had caused me because otherwise my frame wouldn't have been scrawny enough to fit.

As I quietly, and albeit a bit painfully slipped through the bars I mentally cheered. I knew there was a slim chance I would get away with this, but I had to try. Just try once to see my family again, just once to escape the harsh reality I was living. There was nothing left to lose, either way I would die, it was just a matter of how. Either die by my own decisions, honorably, or die convicted of something I had never done.

The choice was simple. Now it was just time to act on it.