I hope no-one reading this will ever know the feeling of being in prison, because when I came out today, it dawned me what I have lost. When I went in the slammer as a felon, taking the years for a drug charge – a tender mercy compared to the other charges that got dropped in the court on account of a shrewd weasel of a lawyer who was just as rotten as the clients he represented – people were still using flip phones rather than smartphones. Obama had won a second term in office. Windows 8 just came out. Whitney Houston was found in her hotel bathtub after she took the easy way out with the coke.

Now I'm in the car with my homeboy Wallace. He had picked me up outside the gates, shook my hand and welcomed me back, as if I came back from war. The radio's on now, and I'm hearing a white man is in the White House once more. I hear of new genders, weed being legalized, North Korea stirring the shit as they test their rockets, K-pop being a thing. Names, places, stuff that don't matter that much to me, but they remind me that the world has moved on without me, left me behind as I did my time in my eight-by-eight cell in the penitentiary, occasionally spending nights in solitary after people came to me looking for prey and getting a fight. Guards don't like fights.

It's sobering to realize that the world don't give a shit about you. I've known it long ago from my time in the projects as I watch boys trying to be soldiers as they gun each other down on the streets over corners one crew want to own instead of another, but goddamn if I don't forget that fact every once in a while, only for the knowledge to smack me again in the face.

I don't ask Wallace about our crew. I ask him about Kyanna. I hear from him that she's dropped out of school and works at a salon trying to make ends meet as a hairdresser. I hear she's dating, meeting new people but not sticking with anyone in particular.

I hear she's got a kid. I don't ask how old the kid is.

I don't ask if it's mine.

I tell Wallace that I'm going to drop by on her. He tells me she's moved on. Just like the world. I don't give a shit that he believed that, that it might be true. I needed to see the burned bridge for myself.

And I needed to see the kid too. See if it's a boy.

See if it looks like me.

I think about nothing but that as Wallace drives me home. Not the people I had scores to settle with. Not my crew who helped get me the lawyer that made sure I did five instead of twenty to life, who I should go back and thank and catch up with. Not the fact that I'm finally free of the slow hell that was what the government like to call rehabilitation.

Only the thought that I might be a dad.