So my son and I are in college together.

Malcolm lives two blocks away from the enrollment office. I was so eager for him to get into school I would take the bus to his house and walk him there. There was always some little detail left hanging that kept him from getting enrolled. It made me think I was pushing him too hard. There was always some snag that was keeping things from happening. There's no point in going to school before you're ready. It won't work without the right motivation. He didn't know what he wanted to study. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. And he didn't know how dangerous that state of mind can be.

Once you start doubting, there's no end to it. One small problem can be your excuse to throw it all away. Thinking like that kept me down for my whole life. And here it was just getting started in him.

But he finally enrolled and now we study together and run into each other on campus. Now we have problems like finding time to study for exams and attend classes. We don't even want to think about the problems we overcame to get here.

I was able to show Malcolm all the things I had to figure out on my own. He is no better at asking for help than I am. I was able to show him where to go to sign up for financial aid. I helped him find an advisor and choose classes. We had to redo his schedule, but we got to it early enough to get the classes and times he wanted. As we went through the sections, I saw some professors I know and made him pick them.

One problem we have always had is rent. As students, we have to accept that we'll be making much less money than we could have when we were free to work full-time. Malcolm needs to move into a more stable environment, but since he has no credit, nobody will rent to him. I'm a felon, so few places will rent to me. It has been a dream of ours for a decade to live together. We are both stuck until something changes.

We had to buy our books at the bookstore because we didn't have money to go anywhere else and we needed to use financial aid to buy our books, which meant we ended up paying more for them. But school is such a priority that it wasn't a question. You can't go to school without books.

Life hasn't gotten any easier. Sometimes all we do is sit around and worry about our future—but not long ago we didn't believe we had any kind of future. Not long ago, we were locked up and going to high school in correctional facilities. Back then we had to build up our hopes just to keep going. We were just surviving, without any thought of what we could do with our lives.

Along the way, I've gotten into service work I'm interested in improving the quality of life by helping others. I want to make it a way of life. I think Malcolm sees this and that he'll discover it on his own one day. No matter how bad you think your situation is, there is always something to be grateful for, and someone who could benefit from your kindness, even if all you have to give is a smile.

So we were able to make the start, but this little success opened up brand new problems for us. Given the choice, neither of us would go back to those dark days before we had all this hope. I have to think about what hope is. What is it good for? I used to think that it only keeps you reaching for things that aren't going to happen. But all along, it's what I've been living on.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Robert Wilson is a short story author, novelist and award-winning poet from Albuquerque. His publication credits include contributions to the book, “Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” published by the Harvard Educational Review, and As/Us literary journal’s Decolonial Love issue. He is the author of the “Black Light District” series of postmodern crime novels. Having received his high school diploma while incarcerated in 2013, he is dedicated to bringing writing workshops into correctional facilities, volunteering for UNM Writers in the Community, JustWrite, and the Gordon Bernell Charter School.

You can visit him at: www.facebook.com/pages/Robert-J-Wilson/360021757483448