If I Could Paint Tomorrow

A Prisoner's Story

"Learn from the mistakes of others; you wouldn't live long enough to make them all yourself."

"The Golden Apple"

My name is Cheyenne Valentino Yakima. For reasons I will shortly explain, I'm also known as The Iceman. For the past eighteen years I've been incarcerated by the Georgia Department of Corrections. On the state’s computers, you can find me by punching in the cipher EF145002. Some of the facts--the bare outlines--will come popping onto the screen. There's a lot more, however, to be told.

But it really doesn't matter who I am or where I come from. What does matter is that if you're a teenager or someone in his or her early twenties and you read this, you should learn something from my story and save yourself a lot of grief and agony. No one should have to experience the journey I've endured. If I can save you and a few others from the kind of life I've had so far, I won’t have lived in vain.

I talk of someone saving you, but I also realize that I was to blame for my own troubles.

When you're young, it's often difficult to envision possible paths for your future and separate the worthwhile from the foolish. Sometimes we have guides but choose to pay them no attention. Later we may realize that listening to good advice from those who loved and cared for us would have saved us heartaches and trouble. But being young, we may have trouble accepting this.

We may feel that parents and elders have their own world and don't really understand ours. But they were once your age. Not only have many of them had experiences similar to those you're having now, they've also watched as dozens of other people chose many different paths. Over the years, your elders have seen the destinations of those paths.

If you knew that a choice you'd make tomorrow would lead you to the grave, would you still choose it? If you knew that shooting up would lead to AIDS and your early death, would you still shoot up? If you knew that an action you might take would lead to a life behind bars, would you choose it? Some paths lead to these conclusions and your parents often know what leads where. Now I'm not saying that relationships with parents are always easy, but they’ve seen a lot of life and know life's possibilities. Their warnings can save you from unhappy ends.

When I was young I wouldn't listen to my parents or anybody else. I was as hardheaded as lots of kids are today. Nowadays, during a seemingly endless stream of half sleepless nights in my cell, I wish I'd heeded my mother's and father's advice. If so, I probably wouldn't have ended up where I now am.

There is nothing on God's green earth colder or sadder than a restless night in a 6 x 12 foot prison cell. Would I have listened if I'd known that failing to would bring me almost two decades of those nights? I hope so, but of course I wonder. At that age I was so hardheaded I could only learn from my own experiences, not from those of others. That was the mistake that allowed my other mistakes to follow.

Think deeply and don't allow my words to be in vain. This is my story, true and uncut.