A Window🪟With No Frame

(To understand how she got here, you have to go back.) Years earlier, what was supposed to be a two-week trip to Belize with Vinja turned into three months Jiejie never planned for and never fully explained to anyone who asked. It started with a group of women holding something they called Love & Laugh — informal healing circles, equal parts therapy and testimony and shared meals, run by women who believed, fiercely, that healing lived in the heart. Jiejie did not believe that. She still doesn't. Healing, to her, has always been a mind thing before it is a heart thing — you think your way to different behavior, you don't feel your way there. She said so, plainly, the first time she was invited to sit in. They let her sit in anyway. She kept coming back — not because they'd convinced her, but because she recognized something under the disagreement that mattered more than being right. They wanted the same thing she'd always wanted for other women: healthy, whole, unafraid to take up space. The method didn't have to match for the mission to line up. Jiejie has never needed to agree with someone completely to stand beside them. Three months became the length of her stay before she quite realized it had happened. She came home to Florida sun-worn, lighter in some way she didn't have words for yet, and walked into her living room to find the television exactly where she'd left it — still on.

She'd forgotten to turn it off. Three months, running, streaming whatever had last been playing, until something in the signal had frozen and simply never let go. The image had locked itself onto the screen: a woman, mid-motion, both hands pressed flat against glass, her whole body angled like she was trying to force her way through something that wouldn't give. The composition of the shot made the television itself look like the window she was trapped behind. Jiejie tried everything. Power cycling. Changing the input. Changing the resolution. Standing in front of it mashing buttons on a remote that should have had no reason to fail her. The audio still worked — she could hear other programs playing faintly underneath, muffled, like they were happening in a different room of the same house. But the image never moved. The woman stayed exactly where she was, frozen mid-escape, forever reaching for a way out she never got to finish reaching for. Jiejie didn't throw the TV away. She didn't call anyone about it either. She got a plain white sheet from the linen closet and covered it, the way you'd cover something you weren't ready to bury and weren't ready to look at either. She had a second TV in her room. That would do, for now. For now turned into weeks without her thinking too hard about it.

One night she woke to the sound of a conversation. She lay still, listening, trying to place it — too low to be the television in the other room, too rhythmic to be a neighbor's voice carrying through a wall. She got up. She did not go empty-handed. Her Negro Leagues commemorative art bat had sat on a shelf in her room for exactly this kind of unlikely emergency, and she took it down without hesitation, gripping it the way you grip something you hope you won't need but refuse to walk without. The closer she got to the living room, the clearer the sound became. It wasn't a conversation. It was a woman's voice, low and steady, repeating something in a language Jiejie didn't recognize. Not urgent. Not panicked. A rhythm that sounded, the longer she listened, less like speech and more like prayer. She stepped through the doorway. Something brushed her shoulder — light, quick, gone before she could name it. She jerked back hard, arms flying out to catch herself, and her open hand landed flat against the covered television. The sheet did nothing to stop what happened next. Her hand went through the screen the way a hand goes through water, and the rest of her followed before she had time to be afraid of it.

Back in the dark of the temple, Jiejie did the only thing that had ever steadied her in a crisis she didn't have language for. She began to pray. Not in English. Not in anything she could have translated if you'd asked her to. Words she didn't consciously choose came out of her low and steady, over and over, a rhythm to hold onto while everything else in the room stayed unknowable. Eh ko shay tay ha ta ta. Eh ko shay tay ha ta ta. Eh ko shay tay ha ta ta. In the name of Jesus. She walked the perimeter of the room, praying with every step, testing walls she couldn't see, finding boarded window after boarded window and no door that felt safe enough to touch. Even the ones that looked open, she hesitated over. Something in her body knew better than her mind did that not everything in this room was going to be what it looked like. Then — stairs. Worn stone, climbing upward into a darkness that, several steps up, wasn't quite as absolute. A flint of light. She kept praying. Kept climbing. Slow, deliberate steps, the chant never breaking rhythm, until she reached a platform at the top and the light resolved into an actual room — dim, dusty, but lit, faint daylight bleeding through a gap somewhere above. And she was not alone.

Women. Children. Huddled behind broken pillars and stacked crates, pressed so far into the shadows they seemed to be trying to disappear into the walls themselves. They were afraid of her. Jiejie felt it before she understood it — the particular fear of people who have learned that a stranger arriving usually means something worse is coming, not something better. She didn't reach for them. She didn't move toward them at all, not yet. She prayed louder instead. Whatever this room had been holding onto, whatever weight lived in its air, Jiejie felt it settle onto her the moment she reached the center of the space — a grief so heavy it dropped her straight to her knees, tears coming before she understood what she was crying for. She rocked, prayed, let the sound carry whatever this was through her instead of holding it in. And somewhere in that rocking, the prayer changed shape. It stopped sounding like grief and started sounding like something else — something with backbone in it. A warrior's rhythm instead of a mourner's. She didn't decide to make that shift happen. It happened the way a fever breaks — on its own timeline, once something in the body had finally had enough. One by one, the women and children began to come out from behind the posts and boxes.

Jiejie stood. She didn't remember deciding to. Her body simply carried her forward, toward the nearest woman, and she wrapped her arms around her without a single shared word between them. Something moved when she did. She couldn't explain it then and still can't fully explain it now — a pulling sensation, like her body was drawing something out of the woman it held, some current running the wrong direction through both of them. She kept praying. Kept hugging. Moved to the next woman, and the next, and the children too, small and stiff with fear at first, softening the longer she held them. She didn't know why this was what she was supposed to be doing. She only knew, with a certainty she'd never questioned about anything else in her life, that it was. By the time she reached the last of them, her legs had gone unsteady beneath her. The room tilted. She felt herself go down before she felt herself land.

She woke days later. She knew it was days by the light — different, softer, several shades of morning she hadn't seen fall across that room before. Women were tending to her, wiping her face, murmuring things she still couldn't understand. She asked for water. No one understood the words, but somehow, someone always seemed to know what she needed before she could gesture for it, water arriving at her lips before her hand had even finished rising to ask for it. They fed her tea that smelled worse than it tasted, and it tasted worse than anything Jiejie had put in her body in years — bitter enough to twist her stomach into knots, rice on the side, small bowls, patient hands. She drank it anyway. Something told her it wasn't poison. Something told her it was medicine, the old kind, the kind that doesn't ask your permission to work. Slowly, her strength came back. Words never did — not their words, not enough of hers for them to understand back. But her hands learned a language of their own soon enough. Pointing, touching, small gestures that carried meaning even without translation. And somewhere in that wordless exchange, not understanding stopped being the emergency it had felt like at first. She still didn't know where she was. She still didn't know why they were hiding, or from what, or for how long they'd been living behind those posts and boxes before she arrived. But she was at peace with them. And — impossibly, given everything — they were at peace with her.

It came to her in pieces, the way understanding does when it has to travel through gesture instead of language. A magistrate, newly appointed, three hundred li from wherever this temple stood. Taxes the people could not pay. Debt turned into servitude. Children sold. Women sold — to brothels, to officials, to whoever the magistrate decided could afford them. The magistrate's own daughter had planned their rescue. Had gotten them this far, into hiding, into this half-forgotten temple where no one would think to look. And then she'd been caught — mid-plan, mid-escape, the rest of it left unfinished. The women and children she'd led to safety were never told what happened to her. They only knew she never came back for the next part. So they stayed. Hidden. Too afraid of being found again to finish the journey she'd started for them. Jiejie understood, watching their faces as the pieces assembled themselves in her mind, that this was not something she could fix for them. She had no authority here, no map, no standing to lead anyone anywhere. She could not walk them to the next town and vouch for their safety. She could not undo a magistrate or restore a daughter who might not be coming back. But she could sit with them until fear stopped being the only thing left in the room.

Days passed in that patient, wordless rhythm — tea, rice, small gestures, Jiejie's strength slowly returning, the space between her and the women and children slowly closing without ever needing language to close it. She began, in the only way she had, to ask the question that mattered: what happens if you leave. Not through words. Through pointing toward the boarded windows, toward the world beyond them, toward the road none of them had taken since arriving. Through her own stance — steady, upright, unafraid — held again and again until it started to mean something to them beyond a stranger's borrowed courage. One of the older women was the first to understand what Jiejie was actually asking. She looked toward the window. Looked at the children. Looked, finally, at Jiejie — and something passed over her face that hadn't been there before. Not certainty. Not safety. Just the smallest crack of maybe. Hope, when it's real, rarely arrives loud. It arrived in that room as a woman's hand tightening slightly around a child's shoulder, a breath held and released differently than it had been held for however many months they'd been living in that dark. A decision not yet made, but no longer unthinkable. Jiejie felt something shift in the air itself. And that was when the room began to blur.

She didn't get to say goodbye. There wasn't time to explain, even if she'd had the words. The temple dissolved at the edges the same way it had first come into focus — light bending, sound smearing, the faces she'd spent days learning to read without language fading into static before she could commit them fully to memory. She reached for the older woman's hand and caught only air.

The dark of the temple gave way to a different dark — her own living room, lit only by the thin gray light of early morning through the blinds. She was standing in front of the television. Exactly where she'd been standing the night this started. The white sheet had slipped, one corner hanging loose off the edge of the screen, like something underneath it had shifted while she was gone. Jiejie stared at it for a long moment before she moved. Then, slowly, she reached out and pulled the rest of the sheet away. The screen was black. Just black — no frozen woman, no hands pressed against glass, no window that wasn't really a window. She held her breath and pressed the power button, half-expecting the image to still be there underneath, waiting. The television turned on normally. A cooking show. Ordinary light, ordinary sound, nothing straining against the glass. Jiejie sat down slowly on the arm of the sofa, sheet still bunched in her hand, and let herself breathe for what felt like the first time in days. She didn't call anyone. She didn't try to explain it. Not that night, not for a long time after. She just sat there, in the gray early light, watching a stranger teach someone how to fold dumplings on a screen that had finally let her go.