blog 19

Guilty by association

Here I am, sitting next to this person who I used to know very well. I’m infuriated with myself for letting my friends convince me to do what they do. This kind of behavior always gets me in trouble. This room is getting colder and colder as time goes by. I’ve obviously been in a room like this before but things are different when you don’t belong here. This time I can’t leave until someone shows up with some money or these badges have a change of heart. At this point, I don’t think john even cares about where we are and what we are here for. John might as well have his own apartment here. If you haven’t guessed, we are in jail. I don’t want to get into why we are here, but I will so you can understand why I feel the way I do.
I usually come home on weekends to spend time with my friends because I don’t live around them anymore. The sad part is, I’m the only one from my crew that made it out of the city for school. This makes things weird when I come home because in order to be with my friends, I need to be around some things that could be illegal. Even though I was raised to stay away from these types of situations, part of me still wants to take the risk. I already knew that some of my friends were involved in drugs and alcohol but I only made a big deal out of it when I saw the flashing lights. We got lucky more times than I can remember simply because we were dumb youngsters and they had bigger fish to fry, but I’m sure that they didn’t forget our faces.
One time in particular, I wasn’t as lucky as I was used to being. My boys and I were headed to a party when one of the guys started talking about what he did last night. The kid named john was telling us that he broke in to this old lady’s house and stole some money and jewelry. John said that someone might’ve seen him break in because he heard the infamous sirens as soon as he took his first step out the back door. As expected, he took off running into the woods. In some cases, the woods would be the first place that police look when there is a disturbance. While John was running, he said that he heard keys shaking from different areas of the woods. At this point he realized that the cops had him cornered. At this point he fell to the floor and covered himself up with leaves and dirt. It was so dark outside that police couldn’t see him with their flashlights. John had on all black clothing and ended up sliding to the nearest bushes. Eventually the cops left the woods and returned to the house to try and gather some clues. John decided to run as fast he could to our friend’s house that lived a few blocks away. The new fugitive realized about an hour before we left for the party that he was missing his wallet. A flashback of his run through the woods came to john immediately. Unfortunately John was careless and didn’t treat as seriously as the rest of us. We were now about ten minutes away from the party when we saw the flashes of red and blue on the houses around us. We all suddenly took off like a rocket in all directions. I don’t know why I ran but my instincts decided for me. This decision was very stupid because as soon as I ran, I became a criminal. The cops don’t care why I’m running and they are planning to throw me into the same jail as the real criminals. I guess I have extremely bad luck because as I ran I realized that John was right behind me and so were the cops. We ran into a dead end and realized where I was headed. I was too scared to think and the sound of keys made things worse.
The cell was small and cold. I had plenty of time to observe my surroundings in case someone asks me what it was like. I also had enough time to think about what got me into this dark lifeless corner of the world. I was associating myself with the wrong people. I felt like I had to be around them because they were my friends. I guess the title of this chapter of my life would be called guilty by association. I wasn’t a guilty person, I was as guilty as my friends were because I was with them. I guess this was yet another lesson learned.