A Letter from a Stranger

I'd been out of the office for a couple of days, and then there was the weekend. So the pile of mail in my box was quite large. It is Commencement week, and there is a lot to do; but there are still some positions to fill, so the mail and the resumes the envelopes would contain had to be a priority. I stacked the envelopes, slit them, and began pulling the resumes out. I was only a little bit surprised when one contained four hand-written pages on lined paper -- I've written before about some of the strange responses I receive for an advertised position.
. . . .
The letter opened with a salutation, and my full name. The writer was not applying for any of the vacancies I'd advertised in the past few weeks. Rather, he was a prison inmate who'd seen my name in one of the ads, and decided to invite me to be a penpal. He went on to tell me of his offenses -- a little cocaine here, a car theft there, some petty thievery, a bit of aggravated assault. He spoke of being lonely and hoping I was the kind of nice person who would want to correspond with him.
. . . .
I'm not.
. . . .
My stomach contracted. My chest tightened. I felt invaded, threatened, and a little bit dirtied. I felt revulsion, horror, and shock. I wanted this not to have happened to me.
. . . .
He spoke of his loneliness, about his childhood of abuse -- though not using that as an excuse; he talked of his few possessions (toilet articles and soup) and how long he had been in prison (thirteen years this coming September). He wrote of the desperation for companionship that drove him to write to a stranger, a person advertising for a teacher of Middle School Spanish. I thought of how sad his life is. I wondered, too, how many of these letters he has sent out, and whether anyone ever wrote back.
. . . .
Getting past my sense of shock, while driving home I thought about how each of us has made some bad decisions, some poor choices, at some time or another. I thought that he just made a few more than most of us. I thought about a dear cyberfriend who has a son that has been in and out of jail a couple of times, and tried to think if I would feel differently if the letter had come from him. But it hadn't, and I couldn't figure out whether I would have more compassion for someone I "sort of" knew.
. . . .
My correspondent said nothing suggestive or offensive. He did not ask for money and there was nothing sexual in his content. Nevertheless, I felt this very unpleasant sense of intrusion. My life has been fairly sheltered, and all at once I feel slightly less safe than before.