On Watching the World Moving On from Behind Bars

By Ryan M. Moser — FROM THE INSIDE

Yesterday, I held a penny for the first time in seven years. A program volunteer accidentally dropped some spare change out of his pocket, bouncing onto the white institutional tile floor and settling under my chair. A common occurrence. Yet when I picked up a flat penny to return it, something extraordinary happened — an awakening. A sudden attainment of enlightenment under a bodhi tree.

It felt much lighter and thinner and smaller in diameter than what I remember pennies being before I came to prison. Incarcerated people don’t use money, and I hadn’t felt the jingle of coins in my pants for years.

“Dude, have they changed the design of a penny?” I asked my friend sitting next to me.

He grabbed the copper-plated zinc circle and analyzed it.

“I think it’s slimmer. It’s hard to tell. What’s the date?”

As we sat there contemplating the possibility, I couldn’t stop thinking about the existence of micro-changes in life since coming to prison for my addiction. I’d always been aware of the macro-presidential elections, Black Lives Matter, babies born and parents dying, wars ending — but I’d yet to really notice the more subtle differences in the world over the past seven years.

As I held the Lincoln Memorial between my thumb and forefinger, I pondered common things that were going on outside of prison that I was missing: the three little dots of an incoming text message; the ubiquity of Tik Tok; the Internet of Things; Olivia Rodrigo and self-driving cars. Most were technological advances or cultural trends, but it went deeper than that too; slowly changing things like my son’s athleticism or our warming planet got past me.

Inside these walls of steel and concrete and delusion, many of us hold onto the misconception that the world is frozen in time while we follow our daily routines. That society is simply waiting for us to return before starting to move again. But this is an institutionalized falsehood: a fairy tale told throughout the cell blocks of the penitentiary to help reconcile the forward passage of time without us.

I do my best to follow trends, current events, pop culture, modem technology, and…