The wheels were turning inside my brain like a slaughterhouse conveyor belt. Did they really think that they’d be able to control me; to limit my freedom out of the safety of others? Greystone was my new home for the next 20 years, 8 years before the possibility of parole, pending my psychiatric evaluation.

I cocked my middle finger hidden in my palm, thinking, “here’s to your psychiatric evaluation” as they led me down the sterile hallway to my new cell and my new home for what could be the rest of my life.

I glanced at the passing orderlies, seeing behind their smirking faces the realization that I would be theirs for a long time. We would get to know each other very well. They would be my mothers and fathers--- sisters and brothers--- filled with the same resentments, dramas, and troubles that any family shared.

I was escorted into my private room, the door locked behind me. I moved to the window, seeing through the slits of wired glass and large steel bars a blossoming tree along the grounds. If the people on the other side of the door were my new family, the tree on the other side of this window would be my world.

My mind continued to race, filled with abstractions of how to slowly peel away the bars to get to the freedom that I knew I deserved. To feel the ecstasy of knowing and releasing the fears I once felt when I finally admitted to myself I was gay.

But I’m also an abomination to that very community because I’m what they’d call a Cunanan, a freak--- a psycho who just happens to be a homosexual.

Well, I got news everyone. As politically uncorrect as it is, there ARE gay killers and I happen to be one of them. Insane, dual personality, and a big queen.

I see a bird, a large black crow--- perhaps a raven, land in the branches of the large tree on the other side of my window. It can fly, it can come and go as it pleases, and it also will eat dead animals off the side of the road.

I’m not afraid of who I am but I am afraid of my freedom being taken away like a raven whose wings have been clipped. I think of my first trip to London all of a sudden, when as I teenager I visited the Tower of London, seeing groups of ravens, their wings clipped because of the superstition is that if the ravens were to ever leave, the Tower would fall.

If I leave Greystone, will it fall? Perhaps I’ll have to destroy the very thing that is supposed to heal me.