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Just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, knowing which step to take begins with a journey of a thousand miles.

The northwest corner typically served as the halfway point. The 7,343 steps making up the perimeter, from the southeast entrance to the prison yard heading west before a sharp right turn northbound and two more rights to cover the entirety of the rectangular lawn, had become as much a part of Alexander Cliff’s daily life as three hot meals and supervised afternoon reading in a library stocked with donated books and whatever reading material was left behind by former inmates. Unlike penitentiaries housing men and women convicted of more dangerous or violent crimes, this minimum security institution Alex had called home for two-and-a-half years had no thick walls or watchtowers. Border walls or not, however, it was still a prison.

On the final of these daily strolls, Alex was a freer man than he had been on his first. It wasn’t the ticking down of mere minutes until his release that welcomed a growing freedom, rather it had been a process which began shortly after the wrongfully convicted Alex first traded his bespoke suits for standard issue prison garb. It’s true, Alex had not committed the crime for which he was imprisoned, but that did not make him an innocent man. Initially, Alex had been enraged by the injustice, by the egregious bastardization of a legal system that would lock away an innocent man. Throughout the first year of his sentence, Alex stewed in the corner of the prison yard during recreation time, he obsessively read legal books and case histories he believed could help vindicate his name, that could refute evidence used in trial and SEC Lou Hakins’s expert testimony, and overturn the guilty verdict handed down by the judge who found Alex guilty of conspiracy to bribe a federal official. The same fanaticism and complete devotion to building his financial empire that had consumed Alex in the years before his arrest had now been transferred to proving his own innocence.

It remained a singular focus with no deviation until the day Alex realized there was no innocence to prove. He knew he was not guilty, at least of the crimes for which he was convicted and sentenced to prison. He had not attempted to bribe a government official in Louisiana to secure exclusive port rights prior to their becoming available at public auction, that was simply the clear and indisputable truth, but the fact Alex was not guilty of these particular charges did not make him an innocent man. Prison was a karmic punishment, Alex concluded, one of which he was in desperate need. It was as if the cosmos had granted Alex this sentence as a hard stop to the vacuous existence of the years preceding his arrest and as a way and time to delve deeper within himself and gain understanding.