The size of it
FARAH The new room is larger. I check the window first — the bars are still there. I run my fingers along them the way I’ve been running my fingers along every constraint in this place, cataloguing what is real and what is manageable and what is simply the shape of my life right now. The bars are real. But the window itself is bigger, letting in more of the pale winter light, and there is a proper desk and a chair that doesn’t punish your spine for sitting in it, and the bed is wider than the one I’ve been sleeping in for weeks. It is still a prison. It is a more comfortable prison, and I am not going to be grateful for that, I decide, standing in the center of it on the first morning with my arms crossed and my inventory complete. Comfort is not the same as freedom. A gilded cage is
- Writer
