Open Writing

My friend has sent me a rose. It is quite perfect, exquisite in every detail. There is one beautiful full blown flower, its petals curving and overlapping as only roses do, and several buds, not yet ready to lift their faces to the sun. They hide behind the dark leaves, serrated, pristine, unsullied by mite or aphid.
It came not with a message, my rose: just my name printed in careful script below - writing like my grandmother used to do, not taught any more, I fear.


“What colour?” you say
“Why don’t you tell us the colour?”


Ah yes, the colour. Should it be red or white, pink perhaps? Would he send me a yellow rose? He didn’t say. It doesn’t matter. My rose is grey, every shade of grey, from rain cloud to smoke to charcoal to almost white. It is a drawing in pencil. It can never die, for it is trapped for ever on a piece of writing paper with lines across, and the elegant script of my friend’s letter dances across the page.


My friend Jorge, you see, is in jail. A few months ago he was taken off Death Row and moved to another place, a different town, a different cell, about as big as my shed. There’s just enough room to eat and sleep and move: enough light coming in for him to draw a rose.


I look around my room; there are photos of my children, my grandchildren, my sister, my husband. Photos of a wedding, a christening and family dressed in their best. A picture of my son on a mountain top under a wind farm, and certainly not dressed in his best. I have surrounded myself with little windows into the past, and through them I can look at the people who matter to me. Isn’t it strange, all the people that we care about look out at us from a photograph. Their faces, the sweet and funny gestures, the smiles of recognition; all are locked in place behind the glass. I am filled with gratitude, and recognise my good fortune.


My friend Jorge doesn’t have this luxury. There is no shelf to hold his treasures. He keeps them in a box, four cubic feet of space for the jewels of his life. They lie among the mundane trivia, the comb, the pen and paper; they can be upended without warning by guards who come out of boredom to disrupt any sense of order in the cell. How many times has Jorge told me: “they came and threw everything about”. I have lost count. I look up and my photos are still there, undisturbed, carefully placed exactly where I want them. What would I do, what could I do, if I were to change places with Jorge?


I wrote my first letter to this young man over a year ago, when he was almost twenty-one. He was put on Death Row at seventeen, an accessory to murder by two friends who ran away. In his first letter to me he told me he was not responsible, and we haven’t spoken about it again. I do know a great deal more, but that is my secret. We have exchanged photographs and I asked him, carefully, diplomatically, why he had decided to have a tattoo across his forehead.
“I thought I would always be on Death Row,” was his reply. “I wanted to be recognised when it was all over. I wanted God to know who I am.”
Not who I was. Who I am.


On a windy day with the clouds scudding by and the birds flying high, I walk and am free and the sky is all mine. I can go outside to look at the moon, to smell the grass and feel the rain. I can lie in my garden and breathe in the sun, and I do, oh I do. I pull out the weeds and drown the slugs, deadhead the roses and water the pots, my feast of begonias and bowls of geraniums. There’s a frog in the pond and the newts are still there, and butterflies dance on the warm summer air. I go and I come, I choose, I am free.


There are days when Jorge cannot go anywhere. If the unit is on lockdown, nothing moves. There is no walk in the recreation yard, no exercise time, no proper meals. Being on lockdown means peanut butter sandwiches three times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner. He doesn’t complain, just tells me they have been on lockdown. There’s a slit of a window high in the wall so the clouds and the birds are out of sight. It was better on the “row”, he says, you could really see out of the window and watch the rain. Perhaps it’s easier for him to write a letter; his is such a narrow world of night and day, and even that has no clear definition. The lights are always on, there is no door to privacy in his cell, there is no silence to listen to the wind. The parameters of his life are so narrow, and mine are so wide. I have to filter what I write, I must not enthuse too much, it’s better to describe the little things, the funny things, the things that he can share.


He asks about my children, what they look like, are they well. “I hope they are fine and are all in good spirits”. “They are fine,” I write back. “Everyone is fine, and they send you their love.” I hope it warms his heart, for a moment or two at least. He has a little son who is just starting school, but that’s a different, a distant story.


I wanted to write about Jorge because he has brought a new dimension to my way of thinking. Before I began this long new journey I had hoped I could make something better for him. I never dreamt that he would make something better for me. I love to write letters, so a small miracle gave me another avid letter writer: someone who reads a lot and asks questions. He asks, I answer.
“What’s your opinion?” he says
“I’ll tell you next time,” I say.
He writes beautiful script and draws pictures and makes tiny origami fishes, and these I receive as gifts. I keep and value them all. I sent him a lovely white feather as a thank you because I had been telling him that to find one on your path signifies a Guardian Angel looking after you.
“I saw the feather,” he wrote. “It was beautiful, but they said I couldn’t keep it. They took it away.”


I did send another one, a little one, and when he told me that it had arrived (no, not by carrier pigeon) I was so very happy. It was such a small thing. Why take it away?


On Monday morning after a weekend of writing Jorge’s story, a large yellow envelope came in the post. On the back was written in big letters,
“Mailed out August 10th. Enclosed, one drawing, one picture, nine page letter, five fishes.”
This was the first letter since June, so perhaps my thoughts had risen up as an invocation. The large drawing was of Christ with a crown of thorns and the thorns were sharp and long and stabbed the skin. Thin lines of dark grey blood trickled down, and the three dimensional portrait lost nothing by being executed in pencil, just like my rose: my rain cloud, smoke and charcoal rose and now a pewter crucifixion.


What will become of you, my friend? How will you ride the years, negotiate with time? I am the one who is free to choose: to come, to go, to walk in the wind.
Not you. Not you.


I cannot draw a rose like you.

I cannot draw a rose.