Her nightmare of a life.

Her black T-shirt was on inside out and backwards. The Russell Athletics tag hung around her neck like a thrift store necklace. Her hair was mated and greasy and hadn't been combed in quite a while. She wore black athletic pants that were, again, two sizes too large. And stains, from who knows what, were the only designer insignia she could afford for her disposable wardrobe.

I heard the toilet flush as I rounded the corner of the beige hallway. Four metal doors sat next to one another with large, square Plexiglas windows. Like animals in an exhibit, the inmate’s privacy and freedom had been revoked. The officers were able to walk down the hall and witness everything the trapped animal was doing. The officer spoke loudly to the inmate through the large window and metal door and finally waved me forward.

The candy bar-sized skeleton key clanked the machinery inside the heavy door. With a twist and a grunt from the officer, the door popped open. Inside you could count the yellow cinderblocks suffocating the inmate from floor to ceiling. Incorporated into the wall, was a concrete bench with a rounded corner. There was nothing sharp in the cell and everything dulled your senses. Bolted into the concrete bench was a round, silver eye of a hook. It was there to handcuff the felon to the concrete bench and restrict any already-restricted freedom of movement. As if the eight foot by six-foot cell didn't already do that.

She sat twitching on the scuffed abutment of the depressing wall. Names of gangs had been scratched into the stained concrete. Gang quotes of defiance stained the bench as if Thoreau had tutored all in the art of Civil Disobedience.

I entered just as the toilet had finished filling the stainless steel bowl. It sat to my left as she attempted to sit calmly directly in front of me. Crack was coursing through her veins.

I approached her cautiously and began talking to her. She, like most ever inebriated felon, began to tell me how today's event was related to something last week and felt it important to detail every event from then to now. I interrupted her, held her intoxicated attention for a few precious seconds, and asked her again what she had told the police was hurting her.

As if she were sitting on hot coals, she bounced up and down, left and right and mumbled something about her belly. I quickly came to the realization that this was going nowhere quickly and exited the cell. She sat flinching as if she were catching fireflies. She stuttered nonsense as phlegm ran down her nose onto her chin. An aging face framed wild eyes. Although she was in her twenties, she looked like she had already lived a life of my nightmares. Occasionally, she looked sharply over her right shoulder as if someone was teasing her in the corner of the cell.

The cocaine, baking soda, Drano, and whatever else the manufacturer of that crack rock decided to put it in was poisoning her body as it coursed through her dirty veins.

I stood her up and walked her 5 feet from the bench to my stainless steel bed. She walked like a newborn giraffe from the cell to my bed, kicking her feet and wobbling her legs. Arms flinched and eyelashes twitched. The crack was circulating.

She plopped onto the bed and attempted to remain still. She couldn't. We wheeled her out to the ambulance and began patient care.

We left for the hospital and the farther we got from that tiny, claustrophobic cell, the more she started talking. The more I started asking questions.

It all started when she was forced to smoke a rock of crack dipped in Pennzoil motor oil with a loaded gun to her head. Her brother was just killed by the same gang members threatening her. She had been high everyday since; her three children were at home with her husband, the one who gives her $100 a day so she can support her habit.

She would have her kids stay with her mother, if they could. But, normally, she was as high on crack as she was. You see, they smoke it together.

I lectured her, tried to make her feel bad so as to break through the fog of nonchalance of the cocaine high. She started crying and said she wanted to die.

And for a moment, I thought to myself. Maybe that wasn't such a horrible request.

If my nightmares were as bad as here everyday life, maybe I'd think that too.