Our Secrets and Scars: A Prison Pen Pal Romance by Maisie Myers

Author:Maisie Myers [Myers, Maisie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2022-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Holden

Fall fell quickly in Salt Lake City this year. One moment, the sun was high and overbearing, the next, the wind carried the sort of chill that bites when it blows too hard.

But I welcome it, that sting of the breeze on my cheeks. I stare straight into it, relishing in the freshness of the air as I breathe it in because it’s been a long time since I was able to experience this. It’s been over four years since I last saw an autumn in Utah.

In prison, I was lucky enough that my cell looked out east across the ball field. Behind it was three witch hazel trees. No one was allowed back there apart from the groundskeeper and a couple of trusted inmates who had taken an interest in gardening. And for a brief moment, I’d considered becoming green-fingered myself simply to get closer, but it was enough just to be able to look at them. To watch as they bloomed and sprouted leaves, only to lose it all so the cycle could begin again for the coming year.

Something I learned during my time studying them is that they are one of the only shrubs to blossom in late winter. When everything is cold and bleak, witch hazel blooms little golden flowers that look like exploding fireworks. Every year, when the months were dark and sad, I’d look at those trees through my window, and they’d remind me that even when things seem gray and hopeless, there is always beauty to be found.

As special as they were to me though, it’s an incredible thing to experience nature away from the confines of my eight-foot cell, and I ache to immerse myself in it. So, I take my truck up to Memory Grove Park and follow the trail north on foot to City Creek Canyon, where the trees are dense, and orange leaves fall around me in abundance.

It’s a two-and-a-half-hour hike up the dirt trail, and I spend it all thinking about the girl I’ve been trying desperately not to think about since I took her home four days ago and haven’t seen since. The girl who, it turns out, is the very same one whose letters were my lifeline during my time in prison. The girl who, despite this, doesn’t seem to want anything to do with me.

In a lot of ways, Kinsley, to me, is like those witch hazel trees. Except, I got to see her colors all year round. She showed them to me in the words she wrote, in the sass she handed me all too often that would make me shake my head at her and laugh.

That was always a funny thing to me. That she could make me laugh even when she wasn’t intending to. I thought it would be impossible to find joy in a place so bleak, but she gave it to me—Every letter. Every word, she made me smile.

And by some miracle, fate found a way to bring us together the way I’d always hoped it would.

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