Creative Nonfiction
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Before jail, my life had a soundtrack.
George Michael poured through my car speakers with the windows down. The Goo Goo Dolls rode shotgun on late-night drives home. Broadway cast albums filled my kitchen while I painted. Concerts were a weekly ritual.
Music played while I cleaned, cried, fell in love, and tried to keep up with a bipolar brain that sometimes raced faster than my thoughts could follow. Every chapter of my life already had a song attached to it.
Then, almost overnight, my soundtrack was replaced.
Instead of guitar riffs, I woke to officers yelling, “Count.”
Instead of choruses, I heard steel doors slam hard enough to shake my chest.
Instead of harmonies, women screamed across the pod about commissary, court dates, and somebody stealing their cookies.
The first thing jail took was not my freedom.
It was not my phone, my shoelaces, or even my name.
It was the music that reminded me who I was.
One day, I was my ridiculous self, singing WHAM! loudly enough to embarrass the drivers stopped beside me at red lights. The next, I was Inmate #380703, standing beneath fluorescent lights while an officer barked orders over the clanging of steel doors.
Nobody tells you how loud silence can become when it replaces the music that used to narrate your life.
Before jail, I could not have told you what I ate on a random Tuesday in 2017, but I could tell you exactly which song played the first time I drove alone after getting my license.
I remembered family road trips by what was on the radio. Softball games by what blasted through my speakers on the way there. Long afternoons at my kitchen table by the albums I played while I drew.
Music was not simply something I listened to.
It was how I remembered.
It was how I found feelings I thought I had lost.
Three notes could bring back a person, a highway, the smell of summer rain through an open car window, or the brief and dangerous feeling that life was finally beginning to make sense.
Then someone took all of it away.
Jail does not only confiscate your belongings.
It confiscates your routines, your privacy, your choices, your favorite coffee mug, your pillow, and your ability to decide when the lights go out.
You stop choosing what to eat, where to sit, when to shower, or when to make a phone call. The days become nearly identical, distinguished only by commissary, court, or whether the mystery meat is somehow grayer than it was yesterday.
Somewhere inside all that sameness, I realized I had also lost the background music to my own life.
At first, the silence was unbearable.
Not literal silence. County jail is never quiet.
Someone is always yelling. Someone is laughing. Someone is arguing with an officer. Toilets flush. Keys jingle. Intercoms crackle. Steel doors slam hard enough to rattle your ribs.
But none of those sounds belong to you.
They do not comfort you.
They do not remind you who you were before somebody reduced you to a number.
The strange thing was that music did not disappear inside Hudson County Jail.
It adapted.
We made it out of whatever we had.
A woman hummed while braiding someone else’s hair. Another sang in the shower because the echo made her sound as though she were headlining Madison Square Garden instead of standing barefoot in state-issued flip-flops that had seen far too much life.
The men in the housing unit next door turned the air vents into drums. They pounded rhythms through concrete and steel until our side answered with applause, laughter, and requests for encores.
We never saw most of them.
We knew them by rhythm instead of faces.
When the tablets finally came out each evening, the entire mood of the pod changed.
Women disappeared into headphones.
Arguments quieted.
Some women cried. Some danced while sitting down. Some stared through the narrow window toward Hoboken, listening to music only they could hear.
For a little while, George Michael could replace concrete walls with highways. The Goo Goo Dolls could put me back behind the wheel of my car. Alex Warren could remind me that there might still be a life waiting beyond the razor wire—and a man three thousand miles away who was something so out of the ordinary.
A favorite hymn could turn a jail pod into a church.
My commissary earbuds became the most valuable thing I owned.
They were also complete garbage.
Every month, I bought another pair because the cheap wires frayed from being wrapped around my tablet, shoved into my pocket, and slept beside every night. First, one ear stopped working. Then the other.
I would twist the wire at exactly the right angle and hold perfectly still, trying to squeeze out one more song before admitting defeat and ordering another pair.
People guarded commissary coffee.
I guarded my earbuds.
They carried me through sleepless nights and the ache of missing my soul mate. They followed me while I mopped the floors three mornings a week as the pod slowly woke around me. They covered panic attacks I could not let anyone see and held memories I was terrified of losing.
Music never opened a cell door.
It never shortened my sentence.
It never changed a court date.
But every time I pressed play, it reminded me that somewhere beneath Inmate #380703, the woman who rolled down her windows and sang off-key was still alive.
They could take my clothes, my choices, my freedom, and my name.
But they could not confiscate the soundtrack.