Page 10 of These Tears

But is a woman’s worth truly measured by how long someone stays?

‘As if!’ Marina barks, hurling herself against the driver’s door. My self-loathing and my faults crash into her where she stands firmly beneath the onslaught. ‘Some people are just fucking arseholes!’ she snaps.

I bite the inside of my cheek. Because the rational part of me suddenly takes all those insecurities and flings them into the body of water stretching behind me.

‘Is that your new favourite word?’ I murmur through clenched teeth as I reach for the door handle beneath her armpit.

She frowns at me as though I’ve insulted her war cry. Then she softens just a touch. ‘You are worth it.’

My lungs seize around a breath.

Have I said something aloud while spiralling into myself?

She says it casually, like it costs nothing.

I feel it, too. For a brief moment.

Then it slips away again when Ron’s voice crawls back into the space Marina opened, followed by my parents’ reprimands.

And that is the problem.

This is why I need more time – because when someone says something like that, I want it to stick. To find somewhere solid inside me and stay there, rather than slipping through the same old cracks.

I need to find whatever piece of me still believes that’s possible.

Week after week, I send a photo to Crane. Rebecca – the programme coordinator – never reports that he has refused them, so I tell myself he must be keeping them. I start watching for the postman more often than I should.

After the second week, Rebecca leaves me a polite voicemail reminding me that the messages on the back must remain relevant to the placement.

By week three, she leaves me a polite voicemail about appropriate boundaries.

By the end of week five, I ignore the existence of the word appropriate altogether.

I trawl through ebooks for lines from old classics and philosophy books to write on the backs of the developed photos – little tests, really, to see whether anything gets through. His file said he had studied philosophy, so it could be hit or miss.

The branch-and-storm photo got Rumi’s ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’

The week after, I dropped my teacup on the front porch. The spill fanned out in jagged tendrils, and the morning fog licked around the edges, eager to join the scene.

‘I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.’ I channelled some of Carl Jung’s certainty into the words and sent them to him.

There were other small offerings too. But no reply ever came. Not a word. Not even a note from the programme coordinator.

Then, finally, I mistook a fox for something monstrous in the woods near Burrator one day. It held its ground in the bramble, teeth bared, yellow stare fixed on me as if it enjoyed the wait. It reminded me of Crane at that table. Afraid, but dangerous anyway.

So I decided it would be the last one – my final photo after two months of trying to breathe life into this effort.

Mary Shelley had the right words. Hard enough to sting, but not enough to wound.

‘A fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.’

I wrote it on the back, pressed the photo into an envelope, and let go of another project that was meant to keep my mind off the self-pity.

And two days later, just after I decide not to flip off my laptop at the obscene price on a snowsuit, the postman drops a small white letter through the letterbox.

Such a clean, ordinary act. It shouldn’t have got my chest in an uproar when I saw it happen.

As I pick it up, I examine the red stamp smeared halfway across the flap: Checked by Mailroom Officer – HMP Stonebrook.