gypsy

On April 30th this year I wrote a post called we all make mistakes where (among other things) I mentioned I'd sent a letter to an American prisoner through the Write a Prisoner scheme. It was my second attempt to make contact with an inmate and now almost 5 months later (hard to believe) it's time for an update.

I received an unexpected reply to my letter about 3 weeks later. And we've been corresponding ever since. In fact I've got a stack of letters here - 16 as of today. I write to a man who goes by the nickname 'Gypsy' and I was initially interested in him because as well as being gay we happen to share the same birthday (different years). A starting point.

The first letter he wrote to me was pretty brief, which he pointed out was because (in his experience) a lot of people who write to him never write a second time. Not me. I wrote back gay away er straight away. I then received a second brief letter, which took about 4 weeks to reach me. He'd been transferred to another prison unit and had had to wait for my letter to be redirected/catch up with him.

Since those initial 2 letters every other letter he's written has been very long (as most of mine are to him). Sometimes we receive more than one a day/week. (No wonder I haven't been blogging). In each letter we reveal more details about ourselves. And as he opens up with each letter he writes I see a change in his attitude. His letters have become lighter. We make each other laugh a lot. We joke about things, we discuss our similarities, share our frustrations, talk about the weather, teach each other slang words n sayings. We discuss books, food and music and how fucked the (Texas) prison system is can be.

I've just sent him a batch of photos I took in Croydon of native Aussie birds - a kookaburra, a rosella, galahs etc - and other local identities. So I can't wait for his response. I've also recently started sending him extra punishment print outs of drift. He's happy for me to mention him here. In one letter Gypsy told me most people stop writing after 3-6 months. As far as I can see I'll be writing to him for the long haul.

Of course Sheila's predicting I'll become "like one of those women who fall in love with a prisoner". But I have no intention of switching gender and becoming a woman... Not surprisingly everyone asks why is he doing time. The way I see it, his biggest crime is that he doesn't watch Television. I guess I'll learn to live with that. The mistake I made was not putting pen to paper and writing sooner