Saving Rain

by Kelsey Kingsley

easy to be lonely in prison. And I wasn’t talking about finding someone to chat with during mealtimes or while working whatever job you were assigned to. No, that part was a piece of cake, and if we were talking about casual acquaintances, I had plenty of those, and all of them were just like me. Good-hearted guys who had ended up in shitty situations. But what I was talking about was, when everyone else was having visitors or weekly phone conversations or receiving regular letters and packages in the mail, I had none. And that honestly blew my mind a little. To know that these guys—and I mean dudes convicted of worse crimes than me—had parents, wives, kids, and friends out there who loved them and cared for them after everything they’d done and I had no one. Not a single fucking person. And that sucked. A lot. So, one day, out of desperation, I took up writing letters to the one person I could think of who I’d never wronged. The only person who I’d truly saved. I wrote letters to a girl named Rain. A girl with the prettiest, softest brown hair I’d ever seen. I knew, even when I’d started writing them, that it was stupid. I also knew I’d never send them and she’d never read them. But it was cathartic, in a way, to write to this person I’d built up around a girl I had known for all of fifteen minutes. And while I knew what had happened to me—up to this point in my life anyway—I often wondered what had happened to her after I dropped her off at her house. She’d be twenty-fou...