The Empty Chair: The Space I Chose Not to Occupy

Listen While You Read

Hear “The Empty Chair,” the song born from this story.

Motorcycles have always represented freedom.

There is a reason that image has endured for generations: an open road stretching toward the horizon, the wind against your body, and an engine responding to your hand. No locked doors. No walls. No one standing there deciding whether you are permitted to leave.

You choose the road. You choose the destination. If you want to keep riding, you keep riding until the pavement runs out.

After spending more than nineteen years confined, that kind of freedom means something different to me than it once did.

In prison, almost every movement is controlled. Doors open when someone else permits them to open. Where you sleep, where you eat, when you stand, and where you are allowed to go are decisions made by somebody else. The world becomes a collection of fences, locked doors, count times, and boundaries you did not choose.

A motorcycle represents the opposite of all of that.

It is movement without permission. It is the ability to point yourself toward the horizon and go. For someone who spent nearly two decades being told where he could stand, when he could move, and how far he could walk, climbing onto a motorcycle is more than transportation.

It is freedom made physical.

So when I heard that motorcycles would be rolling through the valley for a local rally, I wanted to be there.

There was a time when I would not have given the decision much thought. I would have pulled on my old black jacket, climbed onto my bike, and ridden toward the sound of the engines. It was a public event. I was no longer incarcerated. No court order prohibited me from attending. Nobody had the legal authority to tell me that I could not go.

I was a free man. I had served my time.

Legally, that might have ended the discussion.

Morally, it was only the beginning.

One of the hardest things I have had to learn since leaving prison is that completing a sentence does not erase the harm that came before it.

A court can determine when confinement ends. It cannot determine when another person feels safe again. It cannot order someone to stop remembering, stop looking over her shoulder, or stop wondering whether the person who harmed them might suddenly appear in a place where they had hoped they could relax.

For a long time, I looked at my life primarily through the things that had happened to me.

I could talk about the years I lost. I could talk about the system, the confinement, the injustice, and the ways I believed I had been mistreated. Some of those things were real. Some of them still matter. Acknowledging the harm I caused does not require me to pretend that no harm was ever done to me.

But my pain does not cancel theirs.

What happened to me afterward did not erase what happened because of me.

That truth became painfully real when I considered attending the rally. I knew that someone I had harmed might be there.

If I went, I might spend the evening listening to engines, talking with friends, and enjoying the freedom I had waited more than nineteen years to reclaim.

But they might spend that same evening watching the entrance.

While I looked at motorcycles, they might be calculating the distance to their car. While I enjoyed the crowd, they might be searching it for my face. My freedom to enter that space could become the reason they no longer felt free inside it.

Once I understood that, the question was no longer whether I had the right to attend.

The question was what I would do with that right.

That distinction would once have been difficult for me to accept. I might have treated their discomfort as another accusation to fight or another restriction someone was trying to impose upon me. I might have argued that I had paid my debt and was entitled to live my life. I might have insisted that a public event belonged equally to everyone.

I might even have been legally correct.

I also would have been missing the point.

Freedom is not merely the absence of someone else controlling my choices. It is accepting responsibility for the choices I make when nobody is controlling me.

If I attended the rally, no one would have arrested me. No guard would have ordered me back inside. No locked gate stood between me and the road.

The choice was entirely mine.

That was what made it matter.

Making amends cannot become another demand placed upon the person who was harmed. An apology does not create an obligation to forgive. Remorse does not entitle me to another conversation, another chance, or even an audience.

Saying that I have changed means very little if I still insist upon taking everything I am legally permitted to take, regardless of what it costs someone else.

Sometimes accountability is not a speech.

Sometimes it is not being thanked, forgiven, or welcomed back.

Sometimes it means recognizing that I can enter a particular space—and choosing not to.

So I stayed home.

Somewhere at that rally was a place where I might have sat. Perhaps there was an actual chair. Perhaps there was only an opening in the crowd where I might otherwise have stood.

Either way, I left that space empty.

Not because the state forced me to.

Not because my freedom had been taken away again.

I left it empty because, for the first time, I understood that my presence could take freedom away from someone else.

That empty chair became the song.

“The Empty Chair” is not about surrendering my freedom. It is about learning what freedom requires of me. It is about understanding that having the right to occupy a space does not always mean occupying it is right.

A motorcycle still represents freedom to me. The open road still means that I can choose my direction and decide where I am going.

But genuine freedom also means that I can choose where not to go.

I cannot undo what happened. I cannot decide whether I will ever be forgiven. I cannot demand that someone believe I have changed merely because I say that I have.

What I can do is make different choices when nobody is standing over me and forcing me to make them.

That evening, the road was open.

The motorcycle was waiting.

The choice belonged to me.

And I chose the empty chair.