The place they hauled me off to was more of an asylum than a prison. I had to share a room with another ‘artist’, but we had a curtain to draw between us. Every day the workers would bring us meals and once a day we would be summoned one at a time to a room.

The room was white. It was very stark and colorless. There was a single chair bolted to the floor. It was white. I longed to paint that chair.

The torture was not the endless questioning about my loyalties, nor being made to listen to and repeat back brainwashing recordings of a monotoned speaker about obeying the ‘laws’. The torture was in the fighting of myself, overcoming the urge to do something to see some color! The white room was begging for it.

My roommate was caught spray painting a wall. One of many. He and I would never talk about our ‘sessions’ in the white room. Instead, in the middle of the night we’d barely whisper the names of colors to each other, hoping the cameras couldn’t pick it up.

I always imagined that chair in those colors.