Day 547. A year and a half. “Guilty.” The word still haunts the moments just before I awake each morning. I open my eyes and the nightmare is real. I stare up a the ceiling of my merciless six by eight foot box with nothing but shades of grey and a door that I cannot open.

I read the poem in high school, the one by Frost, with a line that put a strangle hold on my imagination - “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

It was a call to adventure. To throw off the shackles of convention. The rules were for others to follow. Fulfillment would come only with the courage to take the road less traveled.

Or at least that’s how my 16 year old mind understood the line. It became my mantra. And for a while it worked. Until the day it didn’t.

Now I’m here, on a road less traveled, but it’s less traveled because no one would ever want to go where this road leads.