​It was a strange, heavy, surreal kind of day.

​In the morning, I sat in a funeral service watching a life flash by in photos on a screen. Smiles, joy, cherished memories. Looking at them, you’re left with a haunting question: is passing away a quiet release from a cruel world, or does it just cast a dark, suffocating cloud over the ones left behind? They carry the weight—the guilt of not being there in the final moments, the unbearable grief of losing a child, a brother. Someone who brought so much light to everyone is simply gone, leaving an open door they were never able to walk through. People can’t run to an open door if they don’t yet have the courage to admit the demons are chasing them.

​By the afternoon, the day twisted into a completely different reality. A man was sitting on my garden wall. I didn’t recognize him at first—not until he said his name. He was a criminal who had spent over half his life in prison, and the police were actively searching for him with drones overhead. Yet, out of everywhere he could go, he knocked on my door.

​He didn’t want freedom in the way most people think of it. He was terrified. He spoke about wanting to turn his life around, yet in just five short months of being out, he had already survived a stab wound, a hit-and-run where a car hit him at full throttle, and narrowly escaped being charged with attempted murder. Gangs were chasing him, new accusations were hanging over his head, and he was running out of road. He asked me to call the police, wanting his arrest recorded for his own safety.

​I made him a coffee. We sat on the wall, lit cigarettes, and talked.

​In that moment, I felt vulnerable and unsafe, but also protective. I saw a lost man who had given up the best years of his life to crime and addiction, using prison as a respite—a place free of bills, free of responsibility, and safe from the streets trying to swallow him whole.

​Sitting there with him, the contrast hit me straight in the chest. On one hand, you have one of the area’s most prolific criminals begging for his freedom to be taken away just to stay alive. On the other hand, you have a heartbroken mother standing over a coffin, desperately asking why her innocent son was taken away too soon. One person’s life was cut short, stripped of all those future years, while another was willingly trading his freedom away to escape the chaos he created.

​Both the grave and the cell are forms of confinement. But sitting on that wall, sharing a smoke and a hot cup of coffee with a stranger in desperate need of protection—that was a fleeting, fragile slice of true humanity.

​It made me realize that freedom isn’t a single, universal thing. Freedom is only measured by the person seeking it, attained by the one receiving it, and everyone ultimately pays a price for it. Sometimes the price is solitude. Sometimes it’s loneliness. Sometimes it’s trading open skies for a concrete cell because the noise outside is too deafening to bear.

​Your own mind can become the ultimate cage, trapping you in lonely thoughts and dark paths if you let it. But everything in this life is temporary—the hit, the chase, the fear, even the quiet comfort of your own sofa. Tomorrow is never guaranteed.

​True freedom isn’t about running until you collapse or hiding behind iron bars. It’s about choosing to stop fighting the storm, stepping out of the mental cages we build for ourselves, and allowing peace rather than protest.