I was in a grocery store in Hilo buying milk for my toddler when I saw the newspaper at the

checkout stand. I recognized the expression on Ian's face, the struggle to grasp that he was

actually free. And in that moment, the grocery store around me took on the surreal feel it had

when I first came home, a feeling I knew Ian would

experience soon enough. The seemingly endless choices after a world of deprivation.

Even just the color palette of a place like this, with its bright fruits and vegetables and

packaging, was a shock after years of gray concrete and steel.

In the blink of an eye, Ian went from a prisoner of the Sawaro Correctional Center in Arizona

to a free man back in his home of Hilo, Hawaii.

He walked out of the courtroom, not in shackles like he had walked in,

but hand in hand with his mom and dad, who for the last 30 years since all this started,

had been mourning the life they all lost. After years in prison, stepping into the outside world

is like stepping through the looking

glass. There's a distorted surreality to the mundane. A mailbox or a key can take on

magical significance. A crowd waiting for a bus can become terrifyingly claustrophobic.

Having been convicted in 2000, Ian was sentenced to life behind bars at the start

of the new millennium, just a year before the first iPod was released, and nearly a decade before

social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter transformed the way we

communicate.

Even in 2011, when I was acquitted, I was baffled by touch screens.

I'd missed the rise of Obama and our intro into the iconic Taylor Swift and a million other things.

Compared to me, Ian had so much more to catch up on.

...