Caged Hearts

Caged Hearts: Romance Beyond Bars

By Anonymous

So I just got home from a visit and I just want to cry my eyes out, curl up in the fetal position, and fall asleep.

Leaving my fiancé behind always feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done and it seems to get harder every time. I stopped believing it when people said I’d start to get used to this or that things would get better. There’s no getting used to this, there’s just coping with it. And this experience won’t get better until he comes home.

I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my fiancé will be caged for the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean I’m okay with it. He was sentenced to 23 years to life towards the end of 2018 and even though he spent almost two years in the county, watching them take him away in cuffs that day made it all finally feel real. On the one hand there was a sense of relief: at least I knew what our future held now. I didn’t like it, but I knew. On the other hand, I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest. Over and over and over again. There are no words to explain how I truly felt; just know I’ve never felt worse.

I couldn’t go home that day. I just walked and wandered around New York City until I stumbled on the dance studio where I used to work.

I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t want to just be alone and cry. I thought maybe distracting myself would help a little. I cried for days.

We learned so much about ourselves and about our relationship in those first few weeks after he was sentenced. We learned just how important communication is when you have so little of it. See, we were spoiled in the county. We spoke every day. Throughout the day. In reception, he would maybe get 5 minutes on the phone here or there for the first few weeks. So it was important for us to use our time and our words effectively. Every second mattered.

We learned how important it was to never get off the phone angry or upset, to always tell each other we love each other, and to be as positive as possible—always. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight or argue, or that our relationship is rainbows and butterflies all the time. But it does mean that even when we’re having some of our most heated arguments and we have to get off the phone, we stop all of that to wish each other a good night, express our love to each other, and remind each other that despite the arguments we’re having, that we will always be here for each other through thick and thin.

We’ve learned to make it a habit to talk about the difficult things, too. We don’t just forget an argument happened the next day if our moods are different. We have to talk about what happened in order to avoid having a similar argument in the future. Our relationship is stressful enough just because he’s behind bars. There’s no use making it any more stressful than it already is.

Which leads me to the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last two years—to never lose myself through this. It is okay to put myself first sometimes. It’s okay to put my well-being first and to make sure I’m good. Because to be completely honest, if I’m not okay, there is no way he will be. To be honest, I think the biggest mistake a lot of folks with loved ones on the inside make is that they act like they’re in there with them. We’re not. It’s okay to say we’re not. It’s okay to appreciate our freedom and to exercise autonomy. It’s okay if we can’t put money on their books because we don’t have it, because we have to pay our bills, or because we want to buy something cute for ourselves.

Because the more we guilt ourselves and the less we practice self-care (whatever that means for us—some yoga, a mani-pedi, or spending all day at home binging our favorite show) the less we’ll be able to be there for our loved ones when it really matters. And to be honest, the less we make sure we’re good, the less we’ll be able to last for an entire bid.

At the end of the day, my goal is to make this relationship last in the midst of almost insurmountable odds. Because prison is insurmountable. So we can’t let those people break us, too. They’ve already caged our hearts.