Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss For about 10 years, I worked full time in prisons as a teacher, logging more than 40 hours a week behind those fences, including a long winter at one facility that had been a cereal factory and stood near the highway in downtown Indianapolis. It was a rock of a building with finger-thick grilles on the windows. During my first week there, an inmate laughed when I asked him to reset the wall clock. "A few minutes off?" he said. We need one that goes by months and years. What do we care about five minutes? I mention this only because his words summed up the love story that had defined my life. When my wife left me, I was living in Paris, which was not as romantic as it may sound because I was incredibly lonely. My bones ached, especially at the sound of accordions in train stations. All my plans had come to nothing. I had failed at marriage, failed at work and had no money to speak of. Sometimes I would see my ex-wife on the street and she would turn away with an eagerness that could not be ignored. One night I came upon two boys robbing an old Vietnamese man, and when I tried to intervene and make them stop, they turned on me. I began to wonder if maybe a part of me wanted to die. I moved back to the United States and took the job in the prison. I met the inmate who helped me with the clock. I also met an inmate who had salt-and-pepper hair, huge biceps and a pair of ridiculous glasses no one in the free world would ever wear. This inmate's name was Mike. Mike showed me a folder of clippings and photocopied certificates from all the educational programs he had completed in prison. He had earned a G.E.D. and a bachelor's degree, as well as certifications in the usual programs like small engine repair and barbering. He had kept letters from his counselors, chaplains and teachers. In these letters, supervisor after supervisor claimed to love him, but it all struck me as kind of sad and awkward. I couldn't read the whole thing. I had my own problems. I had taken a tiny apartment and spent my evenings trying to write a book and corresponding with women I had met on the Internet. I took all my lost chances so personally. When I first met Mike, he said: "These young guys - they just got locked up and they've got five years to do and they hate it. I get that. When you're 20, five years is a long time, so they act out. I used to be like that. But now I'm two-thirds done, so every day is taking me closer to the door. When I think like that, I can get up in the morning and smile. A month later, my supervisor told me Mike had been locked up for more than 16 years and had at least 8 more to go. Arrested when he was a teenager, he wasn't going to be released until he was in his mid-40s. He had raped the sheriff's daughter in his hometown. It didn't matter how fat his folder of supportive letters got. "I used to be angry," Mike told me. I'd pick fights over nothing. I was mad to be in prison and I wanted everyone else to be mad, too. But then I realized: Man, this is my life. Do I want to be that guy? Always mad? I'm not going to get married or have a family. Maybe never. I'm going to be here. I'm a prisoner. There are some things I'm never going to do. And I can spend my life being mad about that, or I can try something else. I asked him what he had decided. "I decided to be the best prisoner I could be," he said. This all relates to the clock on the wall because I fell in love again, and this became my new life. She was from New Hampshire and had never been to France. She left me for two years to write a memoir about her mother, but then she came back. She wrote me letters and I felt I knew her entire apartment because I studied the tiny photos she sent me of her sitting at her desk or standing by her curtains. We were married, but not before I went to New Hampshire and met her mother. That afternoon, her mother could barely look at me. She was 48 and very sick, just a few months away from being dead. Chris Huntington is the author of the novel "Mike Tyson Slept Here." He lives in Singapore and is at work on a young-adult novel about a tri-racial family.