“From The First To The Last” ( For @nytimes ) Tez stopped cutting my hair and with his enormous arms set the clippers down on the upside down trash can to our left. I lamented how I never wanted any of this, how tired I was and how my work was always in pursuit of something I loved. He looked me dead in the eyes and said “I’m gonna stop you right there brother, it don’t matter what you want, the world don’t work that way and God put you here for a reason. Everybody here can see it. You’re different, you ain’t like anybody in here, you’ve got something special man. Now you go and you tell that story everywhere and to everyone and when you get the chance you speak for all of us, cause some of us will never have your voice.” He finished cutting my hair and off I went back to my cell. J.R. Was praying salah and I joined him for strength for the next morning’s court date. I told that story. I told it to everyone I met, In handcuffs and over chess, sleeping on dirty prison floors and eating bag lunches. I told it chained to a hospital bed, I told it under fluorescent lights at god-forsaken hours in the morning and again when the sun rose. I told it on days I had no strength and when I couldn’t speak anymore I wrote. I wrote until my heart bled unfathomably onto sheets of paper. I wrote for me and thousands of voices silenced in the system. I wrote for NO’s smile when he saw his baby girl, I wrote for the way Tim’s eyes lit up when he talked about his son playing basketball. I wrote for Cell 48 and that darkness I thought would kill me that Wednesday afternoon. I wrote for my art, for my name tagged in every secret corner, for every climb, for every picture that embodied the pinnacle of love. I wrote for something I’d die for and still would. I’m lucky to have that. I wrote for Isaac Wright, for everything he was and is and will be, for every time he picked himself up off his cell floor, for the smile that still forms from his eyes despite every tear falling. Love knows nothing of surrender, in the end it conquers all, through immeasurable hardships it overcomes. (Continued in Comments)