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Fifteen minutes.
That’s all they give us—
900 seconds
to turn a cage into a conversation.
The phone rings like bad news first,
then your voice hit different.
Like freedom found a loophole
just to breathe through static.
We talk in fast-forward,
sentences tripping over each other,
trying to fit whole lifetimes
inside a countdown clock.
You tell me little things—
what you ate,
who got moved,
how the nights feel longer than the years.
I tell you the sky still blue out here,
even on the days it ain’t.
And somehow,
inside them fifteen minutes,
we become regular people again.
Not inmate.
Not missed calls.
Not collect charges
and correctional IDs.
Just us.
Funny how time move in there.
A minute can feel like a month—
but on that phone?
Fifteen minutes got the speed of heartbreak.
You barely settle into the sound of somebody
before the warning voice cut through:
“you have one minute remaining.”
One minute.
Like love can be measured.
Like missing somebody got a timer on it.
So now we rushing—
“you good?”
“stay out the way.”
“love you.”
“call me when you can.”
Words packed in tight
like folded letters in a state envelope.
Then click.
And the silence afterward always louder
than the call itself.
But that’s the crazy part—
how fifteen minutes
can carry enough strength to help
somebody survive another week.