I had not expected the glass.
Perhaps I expected to meet in an office, to sit on a couch or some grey office chairs. Perhaps I expected to chat on a bench in the lobby. Or perhaps, I expected something like the police station waiting rooms that I had come to know so well.
I had not expected a barrier during visits.
So when they opened the door into the visiting room that first time, I hesitated. My eyes blinked to adjust to the darkness and to take in the evenly spaced windows lining one wall. Yellow light came from the other side of the windows.
Two familiar faces smiled at me through one of the panes. My friends grinned and waved.
I felt two things at once— absolute delight at seeing their faces, and a jolt of dismay over the reality of where I was.
In my excitement, I dragged a stray chair over to the window, not caring that its legs scraped against the floor with a jarring clatter. I plopped down into the seat and leaned toward the window. “It’s SO good to see you!”
And it was.
It didn’t matter that we had to bend over to speak into a ledge with little holes that barely carried the sound of our voices, or that in bending over we lost the ability to read lips and facial cues, or that the horrible echo in the room in turn distorted, magnified, and muffled our voices so that it was almost impossible to carry on a conversation.
It didn’t matter. They were there and we could see each other.
All the while, the glass stood between us as a constant reminder that I was in jail. Like handcuffs, it told me where I belonged and cut me off from those on the outside. I could not reach out, but depended on others to come to me.
And they did. Week after week, friends, and strangers as well, braved Doha traffic to spend a few minutes across the glass. We let our eyes meet; we struggled and laughed and nodded through garbled communications. They kept coming back.
One day, an eleven-year-old friend waited for me at the window with an invention. “It’s a Hear-o-matic,” she held it up and demonstrated by placing the large end of the contraption down toward the ledge. She tilted her ears to the opposite end and waited for me to speak.
She was determined to hear me.
Another time, the Kenyan women who used to visit my recently released bunkmate came to visit me instead. “Stay strong,” the tallest of the women leaned in when she saw me.
I had met her with a smile, but she saw right through that smile. Though my own soft voice did not carry well in that room reverberating with scraping chairs and the voices of other inmates and their visitors, I heard her firm voice as clearly as if she were beside me. “Stay strong, sister.”
She stood up, placed her hands on the glass, and held my eyes with her gaze. She waited for me to place my hands on the glass, my fingers meeting hers. Our fingertips pressed into each others, into the cool pane of glass.
“You have to stay strong.”
I looked back at her, and slowly nodded.
At the end of summer, Elsbeth, an American friend, came for her last visit before moving back to the States. I had watched her baby grow up through the glass over the months. It was time to say goodbye.
“I want to give you a hug before I go. Will they let me?” she asked.
“You can try.”
“Going to America? Take me to America!” came the enthusiastic, unexpected response from the large guard who pointed her to an unused metal detector. Elsbeth stepped through and I met her with a hug.
“Hug?” a short guard waited expectantly behind her, arms open.
Elsbeth turned and gave her a hug. Then the guard gave me a hug. The large guard wanted one too. We exchanged hugs all around.
“You go America too, inshallah.”
Elsbeth and I glanced over at each other, amused. What a strange moment. Then, with one last goodbye, she was gone.
I longed (and long) for the day when we no longer “see through a glass darkly” but instead, face to face. Even so, my friends approached the glass as a window rather than a barrier, a way to see, to listen, and to meet—face to face.
What will we do with the barriers between us today?
How will we strive to see each other beyond the partitions that separate us? In spite of the noise, will we hear each others’ voices? When we can’t hear, will we still look and let our eyes meet?
Will we leave blended fingerprints on the panes?