A Comfortable Prison

Thanks to my father, my childhood was filled with trips to the zoo. Ever-fascinated by the diversity, he found the zoo to be an amalgam of unique creatures to explore and study. That's what I loved most about my father, his endless love for all forms of life.

Out of all our visits to the zoo, there is one that is deeply imprinted in my memory. I was maybe nine years old, it was a sunny September Sunday, and my father let me ride in the front seat for the first time. I didn't know why at the time, but in my later years thinking back, I've assumed it was simply a disoriented decision made by a recent widow. I remember feeling excited, which I still find strange, considering my mother's death was still a roaring echo; but I believe it was because that trip was the first sign of a return to normalcy for the both of us. I even recall seeing a slight twinkle in father's eyes on the way over there.

Once we got there, everything transformed into the ordinary as if by magic, and it was a colossal relief beyond anything I've ever felt; things had been so dark and dank since mother’s death. We went through the typical routine: circling through the entirety of the zoo, stopping for lunch as usual at the animal themed burger joint.

I don't really remember what we talked about except for one interaction that has shaped my perspective on life immeasurably. As we stared at a downtrodden lion trying to get some rest in calamitous surroundings, I asked my father if it liked being caged in such a small space: and his response was no, it probably doesn't and the animals in general probably didn't enjoy it, but being brought up in a cage, they'd likely find it a worse option to live in the wild. I asked if there was any place they could truly be happy: he responded no, but at least they lived in a place where they were the least unhappy.

Although I didn’t fully comprehend what he was saying at the time, over the years I began noticing this phenomenon all around me. The first time I noticed it was with my neighbor, a middle-aged woman who lived alone. I took note that the only time she ever came out was to get her mail with a quick scuffling to the mailbox and back, and to accept food deliveries. The eyes-wide gaze she had, looking around like a nervous cat, made me presume she was afraid of something, but I never could figure out what. All I knew was she was practically trapped in her own home willfully, and she certainly had no intention of exploring the outside world.

I watched her for quite a few years before I had the courage to ring her doorbell. Finally, at age fourteen, I decided to pay her a visit. I was certain she’d lead a happier life if only she let herself see how much the world had to offer. Ringing her doorbell turned out to be futile, however, because after asking me why I was there from behind the door, she told me to leave. I tried to explain to her that I just wanted to help, but she simply replied that she lived a comfortable life and was fine just the way she was. I left a bit perturbed, unable to understand why someone would want to live that way. But then again, I had yet to understand the diversity of life. She was comfortable in her self-made prison, a creature of habit unwilling to change, fearing the possibility of a better life because it would be a different life. I pitied her, and wished I could help, but some people don’t want to be helped.

That was the first time I noticed the behavior my father explained to me so many years ago, but certainly not the last. The next person in which I noticed this bizarre trait was a boy I befriended my sophomore year. We became quite close, since almost all of our classes overlapped. As our friendship developed, we began disclosing to each other our most precious memories and most hidden secrets. He was the only person other than my father that I felt I could trust completely, and I believe he felt the same way.

Nearing the end of sophomore year, he found out his parents were to leave for two weeks to go on vacation, and we decided to throw a party, inviting practically everyone in our class. The party was a roaring success, but I found out something about my friend that day that apparently he couldn’t trust me enough to tell me. Taking a break from the strobe rave in the living room, I decided to go to his bedroom to rest. Noticing the familiar red glow emanating from under his door (the source of which was a huge lava lamp), I assumed he was in there, which made me smile because I much preferred talking to him than dancing with stranger-peers. But when I opened the door, I found out he wasn’t alone, and furthermore, his face was being pushed into a pillow by the quarterback of our school’s football team. Frozen in shock, the first thought crossing my mind was to punch the quarterback in the face, until my friend’s moaning made me realize it was consensual. I ran out of the room, out of the house, and walked the three miles it took for me to get home.

It’s not that I had any issue with my friend being gay, it’s that he never chose to tell me, even though I’ve told him everything that nobody knows about me. The next week at school he tried to avoid me as best he could, but I eventually ran into him and confronted him about what happened on the night of the party. He pulled me aside, attempting some privacy in a building where the walls have ears, and he whispered a confession of homosexuality, but emphasized that he had never wanted to tell anyone, explaining that he found himself better off feigning heterosexuality. I asked him how he could ever be satisfied living his life in the closet, and he responded with a somber smirk that he never had been claustrophobic. That was years ago, and our friendship has faded away quite naturally since then. I heard from someone that he got married to a woman in college and has kids now. At one point I convinced myself he was just bi-curious in high school, but the way he told me he was gay, and the way he told me he would keep up a straight facade—they weren’t the words of someone only interested in experimentation. His closet was his cage, and apparently it was more cozy in there than out in the open. However his life turns out, I hope for his sake that he made the right choice, because it would come to define the rest of his life.

In my junior year, I became anxiously aware of my mediocre grades. If I didn’t concentrate more on my studies, I wouldn’t get scholarships for college, which were essential since my father’s social security checks would be of no assistance. So I spent most of my free time at our town’s library, which was conveniently close to my school. It was there that I became acquainted with an introverted librarian. She was in her early thirties, pretty and frail, the type of person you want to rescue from something, from any potential hurt or harm. Our first encounters were simple greetings and smiles as I checked out books, but slowly they transformed as I began asking for a helping hand in the analysis of certain books. I found out quite quickly that she was the epitome of a bookworm, having read every book I could come up with. But her absolute favorite was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. According to her, she had read it through no less than thirty times. She often told me she wished she could live within the book as Catherine, the vessel of perfected romantic martyrdom. I once asked her if she’d ever tried to find herself a real-life Heathcliff, and she told me with surprising snap that there was no such thing: her cat (predictably named Heathcliff) was enough to look forward to when going home. I wanted to make her aware of reality, of how to find happiness here and now, but her head was too tangled in the fantasy world of fiction. She was a tad too idealistic when it came to life expectations, and her lack of a storybook life led her to a sorrowful pessimism which could only be cured temporarily by jumping into the relievingly predetermined plots of her favorite books. She was confined to a lonely life by her eternal romanticism, considering life more enjoyable with her nose stuck in a story rather than exploring all of  the fantastical possibilities of the real world. The most unfortunate result of her fenced in choice was that she could never make a story worth reading out of her own life.

Ever since mother died, father had great trouble adjusting back to everyday life. Although the zoo trip revealed a slice of his normal self for a while, it was short-lasting, and he rapidly sunk into a depression from which he never emerged. Middle school was hell with a despondent father, who could barely take care of himself, much less me. But by high school I had grown used to it, or rather, I had become numb to it. Since father wasn’t working, his social security checks were our only income. Our budget was so tight that by the age of sixteen, I was juggling a part-time job and school. I remember how father’s face, completely blank and drained, used to haunt me and make me sob for hours, begging him to come back. By junior year, I only felt a dull pang of grief whenever I looked into his lifeless eyes. My father’s depression forced me to become an adult at a young age, and I never figured out whether I should thank him or hate him. My circumstances led me to stifle my emotions, which can be dangerous if done excessively, as I would come to learn at my job.

I worked as a cashier at a gas station, and on the surface my manager was a very calm and clear-headed man. He was strict, but fair, and lenient at times when everything was going smoothly. We got along very well, since we shared similar temperaments. One day, he called me into his office and told me my father had called in need of my assistance. I decided to confide in him, and told him of my father’s illness, and that I was working there to provide some financial relief to our scarce situation. He then surprised me by giving me advice. He told me that one should never sacrifice the pursuit of one’s dreams for any reason. I was worried by his statement’s implications: it was as if he thought my father was suppressing my potential. He then asked me what I hoped to achieve in life. I have this involuntary habit of deflecting questions I’m uncomfortable with by making the questioner answer it. And so my manager tried to tell me what his goals were in life, but he had a hard time telling me. He became flushed and kept stuttering. Finally, he told me that long ago, he had a dream to become a screenwriter, but that dream was lost in time as he adjusted himself to the real world. I could see he was physically uncomfortable with the conversation at that point, so I decided to go back to my work station.

Thinking back, there honestly was no way for me to know that I had accidentally coaxed to the surface his deeply repressed pain from past failures, or at least that’s what I tell myself, because I find it impossible to cope with guilt. The next day, he blew up after there was a malfunction with the cash register. He screamed and laughed and cried everything he had bottled up over the years, all of the disappointments and mistaken choices that had led him to where he was that day. By the end of his explosion, the place looked as if a hurricane had hit it. He ran out of the station with a promise yelled out to no one in particular that they’d be seeing his movies on the big screen someday. Exactly two days later, he came crawling back to the station, begging for his job back, apparently having changed his mind on his ability to fulfill his dreams. He didn’t get the job back, of course, but I heard he became the manager of the burger joint in the zoo. Too often people settle for a sluggish lifestyle because they fear the magnitude of their dreams. He was so frightened by his immense desires, he became nothing more than an animal in a cage, just like the ones surrounding his animal-themed restaurant. Too much of a coward to live a life actually worth living, he stayed in his comfort zone. And yet I judged him much too quickly, for I had no idea how frightening dreams can be, especially when they come in multitudes.

Senior year, I had a difficult decision to make: I had to choose which colleges I wanted to apply to. It was a challenge, since I was working as well as putting my all into my classes, so I barely had time for anything else. What made it even harder was I had a dozen aspirations for a career, which led to issues since I would have to apply to every college that specified in my numerous interests. At some point in that muddling mess of a time, I came to the anxiety-ridden realization that too many choices can be a prison. I was only beginning to become aware of the awful side effects of indecision. By the time the deadlines for applications were due, I was at the brink of a breakdown similar to that of my former manager’s. I still hadn’t grasped the fact that all repressed sorrow, resentment, rage had to emerge at some point, and the longer one holds such negative emotions in, the uglier the release. My mind was just waiting for a trigger, which happened to come in the form of my father soiling his bed. I screamed my head off as I put the bed sheets in the laundry all of the hurt my father had caused me since mother’s death, and what was his plan once I left off to college, because I certainly wasn’t going to stay around to take care of him. And then I hurtled a question at him with a fiery freedom entangled in my tone: why had he never tried to get better in all these years? It was a release so satisfying to finally ask what I’d been wondering for years—it’s impossible to describe it. But his anticlimactic answer was quite the opposite, leaving a hole in my head that was meant to be filled by the resolution to this long-lasting conflict. He said he had been trying every single day since that fateful accident, and that he simply couldn’t help it.

And that’s when it hit me: depression was his cage; it was the state of being in which he was the least unhappy. Any other way of living would be too painful, as everything he did would remind him of her. I accused him of this revelation, and he agreed neutrally. Furious with his endless supply of apathy, I screamed at him to say something else, anything else. He responded by saying how he didn’t use to be trapped in such a cell back when mother was still alive, because she brought out the best in him—without her, his goofiness, his adventurous personality, his love for all forms of life, all vanished as if they never defined who he was.

I couldn’t accept this, and I stormed out of the house, got in the car, and drove away, out of my neighborhood, my school, my library, my gas station, out of all the madness and all the people in their comfortable prisons, smiling sadly as if it were the only possible life for them; I drove out of that aimless town, I drove out of my aimless life. On the highway towards anywhere but where I was, I had a startling epiphany that truly terrified me: I was just as caged as all the people I pitied, looked down upon; I was trapped by the frustrating indecision of what I wanted from life, which path I wanted to take; and even when I make a decision, I'll be stuck with that choice, I'll be trapped by it—imprisoned by it. Then again, everyone is caged by their choices, their responsibilities and jobs and deadlines and wives and husbands and children and life. And the most upsetting prison of all is the prison of oneself; we are all stuck in our bodies, in our minds, incapable of immersing ourselves with the all and everything we would wish to. I remember thinking to myself, well not me, I won't continue this way—I’m breaking out.

And that's when I crashed.

I survived, of course. But I still can't recall whether I crashed the car intentionally or by mistake. Maybe by that point I had fully realised that the meek existence of a singular timeline can confine us to the point of claustrophobic desperation, and I craved the ultimate escape. Then again, maybe my mind was moving so rapidly that I just didn't see the turn off. Either way, no one got hurt, and I've barely felt that claustrophobia since. Nevertheless, my worries were far from over, and to be frank, I don't think they'll ever be completely over. That's life. After the crash, I was faced with the gritting indecision of choosing a college, a major, my social circle, my career, my hobbies, my wife, the number of kids we want, where we want to live—all the while realising that I was stuck within the prison of my choices, never able to live all desired lives at once. My father was wrong when he said he used to be free when mother was still alive. He was still trapped back then, in the same cyclical routine I'm trapped in with my family. But he made the most of it, he tried something new as often as he could, he visited places full of life like the zoo, and ultimately he lived life to the fullest. I think it really was the example he set that made me realize being imprisoned isn't all that bad. Occasionally, by loving all forms of life as my father did, one can glimpse outside one’s cell to see what life could have been, and those bittersweet moments are what have kept me going all these years. It's made me realize that I want to feel everything I can in this life, and I want my loved ones beside me on my journey just as they want me beside them on theirs. If it really is true that we only have this life, we ought to be careful with the decisions we make, because in the end we all want to be placed in a comfortable prison. I'm content with the choices I've made, with the cage in which I live. Are you?