Chapter Five: Caged and Seen

Prison, for all its harshness, became a kind of refuge—a sacred ground born from shared suffering. Behind the walls, among the clamor and control, lived a quiet truth: most of the women there were not just inmates, but survivors—survivors of some of the worst atrocities. Nearly 85% carried the scars of violence, much of it rooted in childhood, etched deep into bone and memory.

Shame ran through them like blood—unspoken, but ever-present. And yet, in that broken place, something unexpected emerged: sisterhood. A space where tenderness was rare but deeply craved. Where being seen—truly seen—and heard without judgment became its own kind of healing.

Prison isn’t just steel and concrete. It’s a suspended world where time slows and pain echoes. Every mistake becomes a splinter driven deeper under the nail. And your name—your past—follows you like a shadow so heavy, few dare to reach for you.

But within that shadow, there are women who hold one another up. And somehow, that makes even the darkest corners a little less cold.

Not admired.

Not pitied.

Seen.

Strip searches. Cold, hard beds—sometimes just concrete floors. Lights that never really turn off. They dehumanize you fast. But somewhere between the yard and the chow line, between intake and the endless count-offs, she found women who reminded her that broken doesn’t mean worthless.

They didn’t ask what she’d done—not at first.

They asked where it hurt.

These women—some older, some barely grown—carried pain like tattoos. You could read it in their posture, in their quiet rage, in the way they folded their socks with care—because folding was one of the few things they could control. They told jokes that could break your heart. They sang while sweeping the halls. They wrote letters they knew would never be answered.

She didn’t expect love to find her there.

But it did

It wasn’t her first love. That came long before.

Her first love was a woman—a psychiatrist. Soft-spoken. Kind. She had seen her perform once at the university and never forgot her. She didn’t flinch at the brokenness, didn’t try to fix her like a case study. She simply saw her. They built something that felt like a sanctuary. Shared laughter, long nights, a home. And a son.

Then one day, he was gone.

The accident cracked something that never quite healed. A new pain. A new failure. She spiraled. Hospitals. Medications. Grief pressing in from every side. She tried to be whole again, to start fresh, and married a man. The doctors had once told her she’d never carry a child—damage from repeated abortions—but life surprised her. She gave birth to a daughter. And in that tiny girl, she saw a glimmer of hope.

But hope has a way of vanishing.

One day, word came: her first abuser, Clifford George, was dead. She didn’t expect it to shatter her—but it did. The weight of all she’d survived came crashing down. She unraveled. She knew she couldn’t live as both a wife and a woman still longing for her former partner. The dissonance between who she was and who she tried to be tore her in two. She blamed herself for everything—her lost son, her failed love, her inability to stay.

She made the hardest decision of all.

She let her daughter go. Not out of abandonment, but love. She believed her daughter would be safer, better, with her father. It was another wound. Another goodbye.

She didn’t expect love to find her again—not after that.

But it did.

It started with a shared shift on the night cleaning crew. Then long talks in the laundry room, folding uniforms while stealing glances. The woman’s name was Ronna. Her laugh was low and soft, like a secret. Her hands knew both violence and tenderness. She had a scar on her collarbone and eyes that didn’t look away.

Ronna didn’t treat her like a case file or a charity project. She treated her like a woman—with desire, with gentleness, with respect. For the first time, she made love without dissociating. She stayed present, even when it was terrifying.

They weren’t allowed to touch much—not in public. A brush of fingers. A coded look. In that space, even a glance could feel like church. Their love was unsanctioned, unprotected, and utterly real.

Of course, it ended—like most things in prison do. Transfers. Time. Life. But the imprint remained.

Ronna was the first person since her psychiatrist love who asked, “What do you want?”—and waited for a real answer.

Even after Ronna was gone, that question lingered.

For a while, she became the one others came to. Girls with fresh charges and shattered eyes. Women detoxing. Mothers with empty arms. She’d sit beside them in silence, braid their hair, or show them how to breathe through a panic attack.

She didn’t have much to give—but she gave what she had.

She had known the loneliness of being touched too much by people who didn’t care, and not enough by those who did. She had known the hunger to be held without being harmed. And she saw that hunger in others, too.

Inside those walls, she found a strange kind of freedom. Because in a place designed to erase her, she found proof that she existed—in the trust of others, in small kindnesses, in borrowed faith.

But freedom comes with a cost.

She also saw the system for what it was: a machine that eats women alive. Mental illness treated like defiance. Poverty punished like a crime. Victims re-caged for the ways they coped with their pain. She saw brilliant, strong, hilarious, wounded women spend their best years behind chain-link fences for surviving the only way they knew how.

She didn’t forget them.

She couldn’t.

They had witnessed her—in her worst, in her rawest—and didn’t look away. In a world that only saw her as a felon, they saw her as a human being. And for the first time in a long time, she began to believe it too.