Copyright © 2025 Jordan Jones
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All stories in this book were generated with ChatGPT-4o Mini and edited slightly. The author maintains full creative control over the content and presentation.
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I turned thirty-four and went to jail not long after. My mom claimed I assaulted her. Five months behind bars, then a transfer to a mental home—assisted living, they called it.
At first, I couldn’t make sense of anything. My mom’s accusations, her sudden shift in behavior. It felt like she had rewritten history overnight, casting me as the villain in a story where I had only ever been the son trying to get by. And then there was her boyfriend—someone I had never trusted. He had put me in a submission chokehold more than once, wrenching my shoulder until I thought something would snap. I had done nothing to deserve it, but that didn’t seem to matter.
Once I got to the mental home, I started thinking about all of it, piecing things together. I wanted to ask questions. Why had this happened? What did I do to deserve five months in a cell? Why did my mom turn on me so fast? But the moment I started pressing for answers, the arguments began. She shut down. She didn’t want to talk about it. And my whole family? They took her silence as proof of my guilt. No one wanted to hear my side of things. I wasn’t the victim—I was just the problem that had been “dealt with.”
I adapted to the mental home, though. I always do. I threw myself into my work, posting online, writing, building websites, tinkering with my apps and games. It was a quiet sort of survival. But no matter how busy I kept myself, there was one thing I couldn’t shake—the fear. The nagging, persistent dread of what came next. Would I ever get out? And even if I did, would my mom do this to me again?
She wanted me to stay in assisted living, tucked away, out of sight. Maybe that was easier for her. Maybe it helped her sleep at night. But I wasn’t convinced that was where I belonged. I could still be independent—I knew it. I just had to prove it to everyone else.
I thought I was doing the right thing. I told them I’d switch to just antidepressants, that I wanted to be on the right medication. Stability, clarity—that’s all I wanted. But it turned out to be a massive mistake.
When they increased my antipsychotic and cut the antidepressants, everything fell apart. The new dose knocked me out, left me dazed, my memory slipping like water through my fingers. Days blurred together. I felt heavy, slow, like I was dragging myself through a thick fog. And then, before I knew it, I was in jail.
I can’t even remember the exact sequence of events that led me there. It’s like my perception was swallowed whole. I just know that I had been trying to fix myself. I had been trying to stabilize, to normalize my brain, because life had felt like a constant fight. I had actually believed that something was wrong with me.
But looking back, I see it differently. I see how unfair it all was—what my mom did, how it spiraled into me being locked up, first in a cell and then in a mental home. As if my struggles were some kind of crime.
Inside the mental home, they reduced my medication. The fog started to lift, but the weight of everything pressed down harder. Depression took its place, sharp and raw. It was strange—despite all the so-called treatment, despite everyone hyper-focusing on my mental health, I only felt worse. Like every effort to fix me was actually just breaking me further.
And that’s when it hit me: this wasn’t really about my mental health. It never was. The meds, the confinement, the endless questioning, the “treatment”—it was all orbiting something else, something bigger. But no one wanted to talk about that. They just wanted to keep me in the system, keep me quiet, keep me subdued.
I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know this: I wasn’t the one who was truly sick.
My mother is the reason I went to jail.
Living with her was like standing on shifting ground—unstable, unpredictable. She ignored me when I needed her most and provoked me when I sought peace. Every night, she stayed up with her boyfriend, doing things I didn’t understand, things that made the house feel tense and foreign. I tried to reach her, to have a conversation, to find some kind of comfort in her presence. But she only made things worse. She was argumentative, sometimes violent. There was no stability, no moment of peace.
It built up over time, all the frustration, the tension, the feeling of being unseen. And then, one day, I knocked her hat off her head. That was it. That was all it took. Next thing I knew, I was in jail.
After what her boyfriend had done to me, it felt trivial in comparison. But she never acknowledged that. She never offered an explanation, never gave me a reason. I sat in that cell for five months, stewing in silence, drowning in the weight of her indifference. Depression took hold of me, wrapping around my thoughts like a suffocating fog.
When I was finally sent to a mental facility, I called her. I asked her about her boyfriend, about what he had done to me, about all the moments that had led to this. She hung up. Just like that. As if none of it had ever happened, as if the past could be erased with the press of a button.
She pretended the abuse, the chaos, the suffering—it had all been nothing. But it wasn’t nothing to me.
I woke up in the jail cell, the walls around me closing in like a slow, inevitable collapse. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, a dull, cold glow that made time meaningless. I had stronger meds than I was used to, and they knocked me out for most of the day. It didn’t matter. There was nothing to stay awake for.
The hallucinations crept in anyway, slipping through the cracks of my medicated haze. Shadows that moved when no one else did. Voices that spoke in whispers just beyond my reach. I wasn’t sure what was real half the time, but the heavy steel door, the stiff cot, and the sharp scent of bleach were constants I couldn't escape.
Inmates cycled in and out of the cell. Medical watch. That’s what they called it. It was near the front of the jail, close to the guards, but that didn’t mean anything. I asked the officers for information, told them how I was feeling, but they were indifferent at best, hostile at worst. I wanted them to see me as something other than a criminal, but to them, I was just another body behind bars.
Five months passed in a darkness I can only describe as a black hole. Time lost meaning. Some weeks, I only woke up for meals, dragging myself to sit upright just long enough to eat. I counted down the days to my court date, watching the numbers drop from forty-five, then thirty, then lower. But time moved like thick syrup, stretching unbearably slow.
The depression was suffocating. They hadn’t prescribed me antidepressants, and the weight of my own mind felt like a death sentence. I wanted to scream, but what was the point? No one listened. No one cared.
The cell swallowed me whole, and I let it. I had nothing else.
Every night, the nightmares came. Not terrifying, not exactly cruel—just intense, layered, and impossible to grasp. My mind was a shifting landscape, and I was lost inside it.
I had been switching meds, moving from antidepressants to antipsychotics. The transition dulled me, made my perception hazy. The world lost its edges, like a photograph taken through a fogged-up lens. But even in that fog, he was there. Nobody.
Nobody had been with me in jail. He wasn’t a cellmate, wasn’t even a man in the traditional sense. More like a presence, a mental ghost. He focused on my life behind bars with an obsessive intensity, as if watching over me, guiding me through the monotony, the tension, the quiet violence that filled the walls.
When I left jail, he didn’t leave with me. He followed, shifting seamlessly into my life at the mental home. He wasn’t just an observer anymore. He started shaping my thoughts, pushing me toward something—something better, something more productive.
“You have to be truthful,” he’d say. “You have to focus.”
But I wasn’t alone with Nobody. There were other voices. My family’s voices, overlapping, layering over each other in tangled arguments and half-formed accusations. I didn’t know if they were real or if my mind had decided to keep them around for company. They challenged me, questioned me, condemned me. And Nobody—he defended me. He stood between me and them, fighting battles I couldn’t even fully understand.
Still, there were moments of doubt. Why did I keep fighting? Why was every night filled with arguments that left me drained? Was I wrong? Was I even sure what the fight was about anymore?
Nobody never wavered. He believed they were wrong, utterly and completely. He believed in me when I wasn’t sure I believed in myself.
But even he seemed shaken when I started questioning things. When I started asking if any of this—jail, the mental home, the endless debates with ghosts and echoes—was normal. To Nobody, it was. It had always been. And that was the strangest part of all.