~• Jonathan Crane's Journal •~

Dated: Unknown.

For a man who has spent most of his life in Arkham, menial things like what date it is today never hold any meaning.

I can no longer keep track of days, so it could be a Monday, a Wednesday, or even a Saturday.

As for the month, the cold around me suggests December, but then it is seldom warm in Gotham, so I can't be sure about that either. It is somewhere in 2016, though, if my mental counting is correct. It could be no later than 2016, either, as I remember the date of my trial when I was finally let out of Arkham.

It was the 20th of October 2016, and I recall it very clearly. That day, a decision was made in my favor for the first time. A year could have passed since then, but not more.

Sometimes, I wonder why I even keep this journal. Doctor Fischer advised it during therapy when she was actively dealing with me at Arkham, saying it would help me articulate my thoughts and get a better perspective on myself.

I am no longer obligated to keep writing in it. Yet, for some reason, I still do, even though I don't think it will help me in any way.

In my opinion, it is a basic approach, one that amateur psychologists use to make people think they know what they are doing. A result of just freshly ingesting all those Freudian theories and believing that those dated methods of psychoanalysis could work on every person.

A single glove that fits all... Hardly possible; a psychologist should know better than that.

Back in my day, we were more inclined to experimentation rather than basic journaling. Jotting down the miseries of the mind in a leather-bound book seems merely a game compared to the depths this field goes into.

But then, my days of plunging deep into the human psyche are long gone. I don't even have my license, and not having one means I hold no credibility to judge what Doctor Fischer prescribes to her patients.

Currently, I am the patient, and she is the one in the chair. I'm in no position to doubt her.

Besides, I promised not to criticize her methods, and perhaps that was why I intended to go along with it in the first place.

She was in no way obligated to help me, a criminal who was known for driving people mad with fear, yet she tried her best to understand me and fought for that second chance that I received in no longer being held as a convict.

Even now, I go to see her once every two weeks or so. These sessions have almost blended into this uncanny version of normal life that I have been stuck in ever since I came home.

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Home.

A foreign word with so many meanings that seldom resonate with me.

What even is home?

This apartment is nothing more than concrete and brick, another meaningless unit in a towering fusion of houses, one stacked up on the other, each holding people who would rather escape from that prison and never return if given a chance.

A suffocating skeleton that refuses to spill its prisoners out, holding them hostage by their will as it continues to douse them in poison each day...

This is not what a home should feel like. But how would I know?

I never had a home. What I had was Arkham, ironically, a prison. Now that I'm no longer there, it feels like I'm teetering without an anchor, constantly in an aimless orbit.

Yet my thoughts wander again, as they always do, making me spin in circles around a confusion that I keep to myself.

Not even Doctor Fischer with all her probing and inquisitive questions could get it out of me. Not until I tell her myself and I don't plan on doing that.

Not anytime soon.

Sometimes, I wonder if I am truly free. Will I ever be truly free from my past and the shackles it keeps me in?

Doctor Fischer and David insist that I have been given a second chance, but it didn't wipe my past actions off the slate of my life. I have to live with that guilt, and it becomes suffocating, clouding everything I do.

I no longer want to live with the scarecrow label embedded in my skin. But I can't erase it from my life, and by now, people only view me as the entity I had carved for myself decades ago to escape from my own fears.

This second chance, an option that not many people in my position could have, feels no different from another cage.

The chains are broken, but am I truly free?

To this day, this question haunts my very existence.

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