From where I’m imprisoned, I can’t see the horizon. With the giant perimeter walls, I can barely see the top of a tree and the sky. That means that my view is limited to the parts of the prison I have access to. I can only see outside when I’m being transferred somewhere else, like the hospital. Then, I get a glimpse of real life and freedom, but it’s a return trip back to prison. I can only see the future in my head. My main goal now is to turn my life around through education and a project that I hope I can carry out. Reading is another way of temporarily escaping from this place and passing the time.

However, I have to spend 14 hours a day in my cell, and in these periods of solitude I think a lot about my future and my loved ones’ futures. Will my parents still be there when I get out? It’s a waking nightmare that I can’t stop thinking about. I’ll never forgive myself if I lose another of my loved ones while I’m in prison. Not being with them when they’re going through difficult times tears me apart and makes me feel completely powerless.Losing a loved one when you are in prison is horrible. You can’t go to the funeral or share your pain with the people you love or comfort them. Grieving alone is horrendous, you feel so guilty and powerless.

I think a lot about my family, my parents, my sister, my nephew and my friends, and I pray that they’re doing well and that nothing will happen to them.

It’s all so hard for me that I want to find a way out and turn my life around. Education is the key to a better future once I get out, but time is against me: what will be left of my past? What do the whims of fate have in store for me? Are my hopes for the future just an illusion? I pray that time will be on my side and that everything I’ve tried to do will work out. I wish I could suspend time on the outside so that nothing will have changed when I get out.

Without plans for the future, it’s as if my dreams are buit on quicksand. But whatever happens, I’m determined to stay on track and make my dreams a reality.

In prison, apart from the library, the gym and a few friendly faces, there is nothing to see but distress, despair, misery and turmoil. You have to avoid making eye contact with some people because they are so filled with hate. You can’t look at what other people are doing or what’s happening to them. The way I see prison, I need to put blinkers on to protect myself and stay focused on my goals.

Never out of sight¶

Images appear in my mind’s eye
When I used to ride the train
To the last station, because I
Could, the train builds-up speed,
My excitement broadens, hope keeps
Me going through the long
Journey

It’s been a long time since I’ve ridden
The train, watching the scenery fly
Past; cows in pasture, horses and
Sheep grazing, such simple memories
Of time gone by

Never to be taken for granted or
Ever forgotten, these simple images
I see, mean so much to me.

This image makes me feel that when viewing the outside from behind a window, you stop and dream of freedom.

It’s a delight to look outside; it piques my curiosity. I imagine myself out there, breathing in that air of freedom that is not the same as the air in here, it’s very different…

Watching time go by, and wondering whether to take the train or not? Taking the risk of the ever-present threat of a police check, or to run?
This shows how deeply ingrained is the fear of running or of remaining at a standstill. He remains in Calais, clandestine as he is, with the shimmering sky stretching towards the infinite. The thought of turning his life upside down, to take a chance or choose to be identified and to take the legal route.
What impresses me the most is the view, the tunnel that represents the infinite. I feel the need to embrace that desire, to freely experience the infinite again. Without unhealthy or troubled relationships! The circle represents a focusing, a taking aim. Cool!

Seen through thick glass, the evening sky is a pale lavender and pearl field that stretches above the twinkle and glimmer of electric lights that glow in neat rows like stars, shining onto a train roof that glows.

He, the traveller seeking transit, stands before the porthole that lays this view to bare. It is made all the more lustrous by the two-toned walls of grey that frame it. A bright flash of colour against the bleakness, it is set like a jewel, a feast for the eye.

No doubt what this man has seen, where he has been and the uncertainty in which his future is cast have all taken their toll upon him and yet he pauses to absorb the view.

Perhaps for this moment taken to admire something lovely he is less afraid, less despairing, less alone within the chambers of his heart, for all men have worked the change of a sunset sky.

I know this quietened peace as well, for locked as I am behind the cream-and-grey cell walls and the stark sheen of metal bars, I have watched a duckling pause to play a while with a dandelion as it’s mother and siblings padded off in single file below the ridged plastic sheets that obscure my vision of the world four feet beyond my window. The playful sweetness of that duckling enchanted me. For a while, until it ran off in a honking panic in a flurry of feathers, I forgot and all was well. Too often we take the simple pleasure of sight for granted. This should never be so. Now I long to see a sunset or the glitter of light upon water. That would be a fine thing.

Like a bird locked in a cage, the illegal immigrant in the photograph watches the trains speed off into a horizon that fades into a fiery sky. Perhaps he would like to go admire that beautiful sky outside, but he’s afraid. And maybe he’s wondering why he even has this fear, brought on by other societies that aren’t his, but one that he’d like to embrace.

The small window, which gives the man and picture a point of escape, makes me think of the one in my cell. Every morning, when I look out the window, I get swept away by an imaginary horizon. And I say “imaginary” because from our windows we only see massive walls… But if I concentrate, I catch a glimpse of the patch of sky above the walls. That’s when I manage to dream of eventually taking a train, going toward the sun, being reborn again.

Read the original version (in Italian)

Physically, the train is but a train.
However, what occurs in the mind of each person is an enigma;
here I have seen several who behold that train in their imagination,
and, in their eagerness to climb into it, run towards it
going so far as to touch the electrical mesh, which leaves them charred.
What a nice way to achieve freedom, right?
But anyway, these people made up their own minds
and made the decision to approach that imaginary train of death.

What are these poor wretches fleeing from?
They flee from themselves, that’s why they can’t escape.
That train toward which they run is just a product of their imagination.
If we remove the train from their thoughts, we would reduce the problem.
We would see the beautiful and, simultaneously, ominous thing which happens
when the impetuous darkness slowly
absorbs the light of that radiant day.

Maybe the soul travels to shine in the sky
while the body is consumed by darkness.
Maybe tomorrow we will have a new day,
bringing its own fervor.
But those of us who did not succumb to the train, will be free,
without fearing today’s monitoring;
better assessing the opportunities given to us in life.

The pavements to ride the train are just a station to beat time and its speed, regardless of the pain of waiting. Police monitoring this station is the unknown waiting and observing, to sink its teeth into the essence of waiting, slowing a birth until it becomes an aspiration.

Perhaps, what he sees is nothing but a painting hanging on a wall deprived of all feelings. Instead, the migrant sees his loved ones and misses them, while they are on a train he cannot reach.

Distance, roads and hard living conditions come between them. His memories are still floating within him, hiding old and pretty photographs of a previous life; hoping and wishing his life, or a part of it, would come back, so he would continue living with happiness, hope, and love.

– Read the original version (in Arabic)

Hurried! My heart races faster than those who follow. Harried! My mind is obscured as my dreams are swallowed. ‘Standing at the Scratch Line’, hidden between two rails meant to prevent collision. Gazing from my window of opportunity where my train of thought likewise my train to freedom travels on the rails of polarity.

They scour the platform in pursuit of me. I am treated inhumanly. So does this mean I am inhuman? I am certain humans possess the inalienable right to migrate. Does this make me an alien? If true can I ignore the ignorance from the ignoramus that labels my immigration ignoble as I live out an ignominious life? I dare not impugn. Because I dare not allow my heart to bear rested before I realize my train of thought. I smile.
I conclude. I need only to gain the platform to obtain a better future.

I conclude: my future is on the horizon. Beautiful, colorful, succinct.

I conclude. I need a false ID, a false passport. A false disguise to become human. I conclude.

Contemplate from the window a world to which you no longer belong, a world that is so close, yet so far away.

You do not know what awaits you out there, what will become of you if you catch that train, if it will take you to the promised life or to a place with more darkness than your life has now.

Life is a permanent risk, a permanent re-start, a permanent death in life. All or nothing? There is too much risk to try to escape, to have to be running from all that remains of your life. It only remains to be content to continue contemplating the sky, full of shades of melancholy, for all those dreams that perished when prison became your new world, your new life, your new home.

Today the sky is more beautiful than ever. Try to touch it, extend your hands, but only reach the face of God.

Soon, my train will come too.

–

Read the original version (russian)

In my cell there’s a small window, if you can even call it that. Because of the hot climate, the little fresh air that I get feels like the bare minimum for survival. This reflects the prison system’s purpose here in Colombia: to keep inmates alive, but barely.

Nevertheless, I’ve often felt like a free man because of this small, insignificant hole for a window.

When I look out, I dream, imagine, believe, and reconstruct the world and life, regardless of the guards, walls, barbed wire, and… more police on the other side.

I’ve pondered over the photo long and hard trying to decipher what it is I was “seeing”. After difficult contemplation, I realized I was looking at it all wrong. This was not about what I “see”, instead what I “feel”.

For my entire life I have been this man. Staring all around me at the glass ceiling, staring at a world unwelcoming to I. This man smiles, and only one who knows the pain of exclusion can honestly admit that this smile is only one to cover the pain inside. American territory, blocked off to minorities, or illegal’s, ex-convicts, those with a darker hue. A world right before your eyes. You can feel it, but you are not welcomed. Here what prevents us are not police checks, but lopsided laws, economical status, and societal in crowds.
In the present you get to stare at something better, the beauty of prosperity, the nit hits you like a blow to the body by the heavyweight champion of all worlds, this is not for you !

Is that what leaving this place is? Is it letting part of oneself die? The extra part which passes through the porthole, that filter which teases us with a make-believe tomorrow, so long as we are willing to give up what we really are…