The Window

I stopped counting the days.

I counted airplanes instead.

Every afternoon, I sat on the top bunk in cell 614 and watched planes carry someone else’s soulmate across the sky. They rose from the same airport that had once brought Costas to me and later swallowed him through its cruel doors, taking him back across the ocean while I remained behind.

For much of my time in the tier, I watched those silver specks carve white lines through the clouds and wondered where they were going in the window. That window.

London.

Somewhere warm.

Somewhere ordinary.

Somewhere people were running late for work, arguing over what to make for dinner, or complaining about traffic as though traffic were the worst thing that could happen to a person.

None of them knew there were fifty women behind six inches of glass, quietly pretending we were traveling with them.

The window was not much to look at.

It was a narrow opening cut into concrete and steel, barely wide enough to remind us that the world had not ended simply because ours had stopped. Beyond it stood the city that never slept, glittering and moving without us. New York continued being New York while we stood still beneath fluorescent lights, waiting for counts, court dates, medication, phone calls, and doors that opened only when someone else decided they should.

Somewhere beyond those buildings were memories of concerts, ferry rides, coffee shops, and summers that once felt endless. I remembered my years at art school, wandering through the city with pencils and sketchbooks stuffed into my bag, believing I had all the time in the world to become whoever I wanted to be.

Somewhere beyond the skyline was Hoboken, the waterfront, and the evenings Costas and I had spent talking until the city lights blurred into the river. Somewhere beyond it was the life I had imagined with him—the laughter, the plans, and the comforting certainty that tomorrow belonged to us.

I could still remember the first time our lips touched at the airport.

Back then, an airport had meant arrival.

Later, it became the mouth that kept swallowing him away.

That tiny window became both my heaven and my hell.

It gave me the world and then reminded me I could not reach it.

Every airplane proved that people were free to leave while I could not take a single step beyond the walls surrounding me. Every sunset brought back the evenings Costas and I had watched from the city waterfront. Every building reminded me of a life that had continued without me.

Yet every morning, the sun found me before the officers did.

It slipped through the narrow glass and stretched across the concrete floor, warming the edge of my bunk as though it had come looking for me. For a few quiet minutes, before the yelling, the counts, and the metal doors crashing open, the light made our pod feel almost human.

I would lie there hoping it might be one of the better days.

A day without handcuffs.

A day without a strip search.

Maybe even a day when lunch would contain something recognizable instead of mystery meat pretending to be food.

The sun offered no promises, but it showed up anyway.

That mattered.

The first time I entered cell 614, it was 6:14 in the evening. I remembered the time because the coincidence felt like something I was supposed to notice. Intake had already taken my phone, my watch, my shoelaces, and nearly every familiar way I had of measuring the world. But no one could confiscate the sunset.

The skyline appeared beyond the razor wire, covered in gold.

The last light struck the buildings, brownstones, and high-rises until they shimmered like glitter scattered across the city. It looked almost unreal, as though someone had taken one of my art-school canvases and painted gold directly over the ugliest day of my life.

I stood there in tan scrubs, with everything I owned reduced to what the jail allowed me to keep, looking at the most beautiful thing I had ever seen from the worst place I had ever been.

After that, evening belonged to me.

Sunset became our goodbye.

London was five hours ahead, which meant that while the sky outside my window burned orange, pink, and gold, Costas was already asleep. The tablet had gone silent hours earlier. There was no message to read, no voice to hear, and no soft “Goodnight, darling” waiting for me before lockdown.

There was only the window.

I watched the sun sink behind the skyline until the buildings shimmered one last time and surrendered to darkness. I imagined Costas sleeping three thousand miles away, unaware that I was staring toward him through six inches of glass.

The colors reminded me of the life I had left behind.

Before jail, I had shelves filled with sketchbooks, charcoal, paints, and pencils. Inside, art looked different. We traded commissary for paper. We bartered food for pencils. We used prisoner pens that skipped across cheap notebook pages and crayons that arrived already broken.

Creating something beautiful suddenly mattered more than eating an extra bag of chips.

We made signs for cell windows.

We drew flowers, names, basketballs, and words that reminded women who they had been before inmate numbers replaced them. We attached paper to white jail bricks with toothpaste because toothpaste inside jail was less dental hygiene than industrial adhesive.

Every sunset outside the window reminded me that beauty still existed.

Sometimes it was simply waiting for us to find another way to make it.

There was another window beyond the red line we were forbidden to cross.

Men and women from different housing units appeared on opposite sides of the glass, separated by concrete, steel, officers, and rules that said they were not supposed to communicate. So they created their own language.

A hand pressed against the window.

Two fingers touched lips and then pointed outward.

An invisible heart traced into the air.

A head tilted.

A smile.

A tear.

Lips silently formed words no officer could hear.

They had made an entire sign language out of desperation.

They could not touch. They could not speak. Sometimes they could barely see one another. Still, they found ways to say:

I love you.

I miss you.

I am here.

Do not forget me.

The window stood beyond the line, but people crossed the distance anyway.

That was the thing about jail. It created rules for nearly every movement a person could make, but it never managed to control longing. Human beings kept reaching for one another through glass, vents, tablets, paper, memory, and whatever opening remained.

I did the same.

Every evening, as the city lit up, I prayed that someone was still waiting for me beyond it.

Through that narrow pane of glass, my past, present, and future seemed to overlap. I saw everything I had lost—the years addiction had swallowed, the people I had frightened, the life I had damaged, and the woman I no longer recognized.

But, unexpectedly, I also began to see what remained.

I had found real love.

The kind women and men spend their lives hoping exists.

I had my family reaching back toward me. I had sobriety. My mental health was beginning its slow climb toward stability. There were no more secrets to carry and no more exhausting performance of pretending I was fine while living inside a private hell.

For years, my mind had been a room without windows.

Addiction, depression, and fear had boarded up every opening. I had lived with suicidal thoughts and urges to hurt myself until pain became its own locked housing unit.

In solitary confinement, hallucinating and terrified, I had believed everyone I loved had died outside the jail. I had injured myself with the only object available to me, desperate to silence a mind that no longer felt like my own.

The scars remained.

They did not make the memory beautiful.

They proved that I had survived it.

When I looked at them later, I remembered the woman who believed there was nothing waiting beyond that room. I remembered how certain she had been that the darkness was permanent.

Then I remembered the window.

I remembered the longing.

I remembered the pain.

I remembered the day I looked down and realized my hands had finally stopped shaking.

I remembered the video dates from three thousand miles away that gave me something to hold onto when I could not hold him.

I remembered every airplane that left and every one that returned.

Time had felt like my enemy in jail.

It was counted in meals, lockdowns, court dates, medication lines, and doors that refused to open. The clock moved slowly when I wanted it to hurry and raced whenever Costas appeared on my tablet screen.

But time was working for me, too.

The seasons changed beyond the glass. Summer light softened into autumn. Winter darkened the sky before dinner. The sun disappeared every evening and somehow returned every morning.

The window taught me that leaving was not the same as disappearing.

Airplanes left the ground and came back.

Sunsets ended and became sunrises.

People went away and sometimes returned.

Lives broke and sometimes began again.

The jail could hold my body behind concrete and steel, but the window kept showing me a future it could not completely block.

One day, my sentence would end.

The doors would open.

I would step outside beneath the same sky I had watched through six inches of glass.

And my time would now finally begin.