The Dream She Wrote on a Prison Bunk

Christmas bags had come through mainline last night—cellophane with a twist, Little Debbie cakes in red and green foil, a sleeve of cookies, a candy cane. Small mercies, wrapped to look festive. The women took them back to their bunks like they had won something.

Janiya skipped down my row, laughter coming out of her before words did, Little Debbie cake in hand, and parked herself on Nevaeh's bunk to ask if I had any more cakes.

I reminded her I had already put one on her bed. She was sitting there eating it.

"Yeah, but why'd you only give me the one? You got more, right?"

One cake, given without her asking. And her walk over was to say it wasn't enough. I declined.

The next morning, the festivity gone, it was still on my mind. I turned to Nevaeh and said, "Janiya felt ungratifiable over the Christmas cake."

She looked up from sorting her mail. "Ok, I got you. And… just so you know, that's all she knows to ask for."

Ungratifiability is a signal. It's the way a woman tells you she was never trained in the muscle it takes to receive. Every time she reached, the reaching cost her. So she contorted herself. She learned to keep the ask close to the floor—cake, yarn, a cup of ramen—so when it doesn't land, and it usually doesn't, the disappointment is small enough to absorb. Do that enough times and you forget there was ever another kind of asking.

And the people with something to give start out delighted. They lean in, bring more than she asked for—until they feel her already reaching past it for the next thing, and they pull back. Producer and consumer tightening on each other until both of them are thin.

Janiya was deep in that loop and hadn't seen it yet. She was eating a Little Debbie cake next to a woman who, if asked the right question, would have walked through fire for her.

A couple of days later, she came to me. "I want to have a one-on-one," she said, and paused, nervous. "Like, you and I could talk alone."

"Janiya." I cocked my head, teasing. "I know what a one on one is."

She laughed. Nevaeh had planted it, I guessed—something Janiya hadn't known to ask for.

We sat on her bunk that evening. She had a crochet hook in her hand and a half-finished hat in her lap, her fingers moving in the rhythm—yarn over finger, hook, pull, repeat—drawing the loops tight along the brim. It's rare to see Janiya sit still. She sits still to crochet.

"What do you want to talk about?"

"What I'm going to do when I get out." Her eyes stayed on the yarn.

I asked what she wanted.

She said, quickly, that the plan was nurse or doctor—but that was a long way out and she wasn't sure she could make it happen. "Plus I don't really think that's what I want anyway, so why do that plan." She studied her handiwork from a new angle. "Really, I want to live out my dream."

"And what's your dream?"

She set the hat in her lap, still looking ahead. "I want hoes to learn how to leave their pimps."

There it was.

"That's great. Write me a one-pager. Then we'll design the program together."

She looked up, incredulous. "I don't know what to write."

"Write what the program does. Who it's for. How it works. You don't have to know yet. You just have to write down what you see."

She tipped her head. "Alright. I'll get it to you." Her eyes went back to the needle and yarn, the gradual work of one loop at a time.

Walking back to my bunk, I thought about gratifiability. She was about to grow it. I had been her once—the woman whose reaching cost her, who learned to keep the ask small. And I had been her again later, when a man's resources finally matched the scale of the asking and the asking didn't stop.

Years before all this, I was with Nils in Lugano, Switzerland. What I wanted was him. I asked for shopping.

He was in the middle of a lawsuit eating his year, ten hours a day on the case. Still, he went with me on a day trip into Italy, pulled himself off his phone to zip me into dresses, to sit outside the fitting room and tell me which one. He said yes to all of it. None of it quite reached me. We went home with ten thousand dollars of dresses and the reaching still didn't stop.

The next morning I said there was one more store I wanted before we left, back across the border. Nils, who had said yes every hour of the day before, shook his head. "Uh uh."

I made it mean something I'm not proud of—he really doesn't want me to be happy—and went cool with him all afternoon.

It took me years to see that "no" was the gift. I had made Nils responsible for my happiness just because he was responsible for everything else—the lawsuit, the companies—so why not me? I had taken his capability as an invitation to let myself go, a kind of female retirement, and left him to carry what I dropped. That "no" refused to underwrite the smaller me, the one who would have been content with one more store. It asked for the whole me instead—the one who could cross the border on her own power, or decide she didn't need to. Standing beside him as his match. Two awake people.

Janiya on her bunk with the crochet hook—the one-pager was that same no, now from my side. I wasn't handing her another piece of cake. I was handing her the size of her own dream and asking her to meet it. That is how a woman comes to see she doesn't need her pimp: he is the small thing she learned to name because the real thing cost her too much. Train her to name the real thing, and he loses his hold.

That was ride or fly. Ride or die says: I'm with you no matter what. Ride or fly says something else: we each carry ourselves, and lift each other. Together, we rise.

Back at my bunk I thought: this is how you do it. You draw one woman into her own size. Then she does it for the next. The way you do anything of consequence in here—one loop at a time.