That courtroom was never meant for truth. It was built for order, for control, for the illusion that what happens here matters. It was a theater, and the actors wore titles instead of faces. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys—they moved in predictable arcs, gestures polished from years of repetition, performing for a jury that half-believed in the script and half feared the power it pretended to contain. The air smelled of varnish and waiting, a scent thick enough to cling to your clothes long after you left, as though the room itself sought to mark you, claim you.

I remember the scrape of chairs against linoleum, the whisper of papers shuffled and slid across polished surfaces. I remember the way someone cleared their throat with the delicate violence of ritual, the way the judge adjusted his robe as if it were armor, as if it could shield him from something larger than the law itself. And I remember thinking, before a word was said, that none of it was for me. None of it was for the truth.

I sat, motionless, a spectator in the only arena where I had been forced to perform submission. My lawyer smiled at me, a soft, practiced curl of his lips that reminded me of a priest at the bedside giving his last rights: tender, rehearsed, and full of words he would never speak. That smile, meant to comfort, carried the weight of inevitability. I had already seen it before in his eyes—the quiet calculation, the part of him that had already reconciled with my fate. It wasn’t cruelty, not exactly. It was the professionalism of someone trained to make you believe in a system that had no intention of believing in you.

They called it justice. I called it choreography. A ritual of gestures and sounds meant to give the impression that something sacred had taken place. Objections were raised and dismissed with the predictability of clockwork. Papers were passed across tables with the careful precision of a magician handling delicate instruments. Witnesses rose and fell like pieces in a game, moved where they were told, weighed by the subtle cues of those who held power and privilege. Everything was designed to keep the mask in place—the mask of fairness, the mask of reason, the mask of an institution that pretends to serve the people while preparing to crush them.

And beneath it all, behind every oath, every procedural objection, every well-rehearsed motion, I glimpsed the face—the one the country never shows until you are trapped in its machinery. It is not a face that hides its intentions; it is a face that reveals them, slowly, indifferently, like gravity. It bears no mercy, no name, no conscience. It is the quiet, unblinking gaze of a system that does not forgive and does not bend. I had not yet spoken aloud, not yet protested, not yet cried, but I already understood: this face had already decided, and I was powerless to argue.

The spectators in the gallery watched politely, leaning forward as though their attention could bend the outcome. strangers; all were collateral witnesses to a ritual that would continue long after they left. I felt their eyes but not their presence. I was somewhere else, inside myself, trying to locate the line between hope and delusion. Somewhere deep in me, I wanted to believe that truth could still matter here, that the scales of justice might balance, even slightly, even for a moment. But I had already seen the gears. I had already heard the hum of inevitability.

My lawyer whispered my name, just once, brushing against my consciousness like a shadow. I nodded, though the nod meant nothing. Words were irrelevant in this room. The room had its own language, one that did not accommodate despair, innocence, or rage. And in that language, my existence had already been parsed, measured, and rendered.

When the judge finally spoke, his voice rolled over the room like a tide, calm and deliberate, each word a hammer striking iron. Every syllable affirmed the choreography, the ritual, the theater of order. I listened, each sound reverberating not through the walls but through my own body, and I knew that truth had no place here. It had never been invited.

And still, somewhere beneath the veneer of titles, robes, and rituals, the face waited. Watching. Judging. Unmoved by the pleas, the gestures, or the fragile hope that lingered in the air. That face was the only honest thing in the room, the face behind the mask of the justice system, and it would follow me long after the echoes of the gavel had faded, long after the doors had closed, long after I had left the theater of order to face the real stage of my life.