My Prison Number
D-22678.
My prison number.
The hyphen is a crack down the middle of me. Letter to the left: fencepost, warning. Digits to the right: teeth.
I learned to say it the way they liked—flat, no music—like ordering nuts and washers at a hardware counter. It fit on an ID card, on a manila folder, on a box holding everything I owned in my six allowable cubic feet.
It fit everywhere except under my skin.
At intake they weighed me like freight. Measured me like a doorway. The camera blinked; I blinked back. Someone wrote the number in Sharpie on a white sign and told me to hold it.
It wasn’t fragile. It was heavy.
It fell through me and struck the organ that holds a name.
“Dee Two Two Six Seven Eight!”
A mouth over the shrill PA. A voice with keys and the power to pass fences and razor wire.
I answered because that’s the rule: when called, you appear; when counted, you exist. I said Here the way a child does on the first day of school—except there were no crayons, only concrete and steel. Saying it opens a box inside you. Inside that, another. Then another. It keeps going.
Here’s how a number eats a man: a bite at breakfast, a bite at count, a bite at the gate while they cross-check clipboard and list. Small bites. Barely felt at first. It’s the accumulation. Surprise searches. Strip naked. Cough. The subtraction of proper nouns. Of dignity. Of agency.
““All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.””
“State your number.”
I do. The words leave like coins into a machine. The machine grinds.
My name refuses to be quiet. It rattles like a marble in a jar. It shows up in dreams wearing my face and a shirt I used to own—the soft collar, the coffee stain shaped like a country I’ll never visit. My name walks grocery aisles that no longer exist, finger fogging freezer glass. It knows my mother’s perfume. The exact weight of my father’s hand on my shoulder after a day he’d call long and I’d call ordinary. It brings me our dog, Baby Doll, the clink of her tags on the bowl.
It brings what won’t fit on a clipboard.
The number hates that. Numbers want straight lines: cells like spreadsheet rows, faces like mug shots, time like tick marks. My name is messy. It tracks dirt inside. It laughs too loud. It puts pictures on walls where numbers prefer paint the color of absence.
So I count to stay alive. Not days. Not yet. I count breaths between lights-out and the freight-train moan of sleep from the bunk above. I count toilet-paper squares and the steps from rack to door, because what I own in my mind is the only thing that’s mine. I count vent holes, security screws, the seconds it takes the fluorescent hum to settle—if it ever does.
I count because the number tries to count me, and counting back feels like resistance.
Visiting day. Plastic chairs. A line of men with numbers where hearts would be, if prison blues allowed hearts. Across the tables: names. Humans. Soft ones. Their voices tremble when they say ours. The officer calls my digits; when I sit, my visitor uses my name, and something in me remembers posture.
It’s a duet—the officer and the one who loves me—each calling a different part, each convinced theirs is real. I nod to both, because both breathe. In a sick way, the officer holds more of me than my loved ones do. Certainly in cumulative hours.
Sometimes the yard sun warms my back and I become a shadow without details—no face, no number—just an outline on concrete, dark as a confession. In that silhouette I’m not cataloged. I’m the shape of a man refusing to vanish, set against the few blades of grass the prison can’t stop. Stolen. Sparse. Like normalcy.
The number hates the sun. It prefers shade, paper, systems. Forms in block letters. Truth pressed into compliance. The barcode beep at property. The snap of a lid. The stamp. The number is perfect in ways a person can’t be. No wonder they trusted it more than me.
Some nights the loudspeaker coughs and I hear my digits in a stranger’s mouth and think: that’s not me; that’s the box they built to ship me through time. The hyphen is a fracture—yes—but also a hinge. A pivot between letter and man. Between inventory and memory. Between what they see and what I refuse to surrender.
““…in the midst of winter I found there was within me an invincible summer.””
Here’s the trick no one teaches: let the number do its job without letting it keep the paycheck. Answer to it and still write your name on the wall inside your skull, letters big enough to scare the dark. Be both file and fire. It takes practice. It takes a stubbornness so dumb it looks like faith.
Years pass in regimented slices. Steel learns my fingerprints. Concrete memorizes my gait. The number grows old without aging—that’s its magic. I age without permission. That’s mine.
Then one day—August 13, 2009—a door opens differently.
Nine thousand six hundred fifty-three days, if one were the counting type.
Papers breathe. The air between blocks tastes like something I can’t name without breaking. A guard reads my digits and nods past me, as if the number itself is leaving. It does. It hums like a tag buzzing off a guitar string long after the song ends. He walks me to the front gate—a gate I’ve lived decades a few hundred feet from and never neared. No man’s land. One step and you’d be shot.
Today is different.
I step through. I carry the number now not on cards or boxes, but as a scar that doesn’t ask for pity. I don’t pretend it didn’t mark me. I don’t pretend it ever leaves. It sits at the edge of my name like a noon shadow—short, sharp—reminding me systems can be greedy and blind, memory stubborn, and the hyphen can be a bridge.
A barista asks for my name. It catches in my throat—not because I’ve forgotten, but because names are small miracles and I want to say mine right. The marker squeaks. The cup returns almost correct, steam ribboning up.
A simple sacrament.
Behind me someone calls a number—deli ticket, bank queue—and the old reflex rises. I let it pass. Reflex isn’t identity. Habit isn’t fate.
I leave a tip in crumpled bills and step outside. Sun on my face. My number keeps its distance, like weather over a different county.
My name hums in my chest, low and steady, a note my body can hold for a long time.
D-22678 is real. It will always be real. But it isn’t the headline. Not the author. It’s a footnote—a quiet reminder of where my story was almost stolen.
The story is me. It is mine.
My mother’s. My family’s. Ours.
And at long last—
I have taken it back.
