In prison, you’re always waiting. Anyone who’s done time will tell you that a sentence breaks down into long and short stretches of waiting. In this endless Groundhog Day, there are a few recurring events (hopefully pleasant ones), and so you live by waiting from one to the next. Of course, people also count their overall time. Most inmates can answer instantly: “I’ve got 583 days left.” But in my case, the prospects of my sentence ending are, to put it mildly, unclear, so there’s no point in counting. You feel the passage of time in intervals. The shortest one is from egg to egg. On Mondays and Fridays, they give you a boiled egg for breakfast. It’s not just an important (and pleasant) culinary event, but a calendar marker too. You get an egg for breakfast — that means the workweek is ending. You get another egg — the workweek has begun again. A slightly longer period is the prison shop. They take us there once every two weeks. Here you’re not just waiting — you actually plan and speculate: will you manage to buy milk, or will it be a bust and everything be gone by the time you get there? You can even indulge in bold fantasies and imagine there might still be cottage cheese or cabbage left. But you have to be careful with thoughts like that; the disappointment can be bitter. A care package is already a large and clearly defined unit of time. Six times a year. Once every two months. Everyone knows the date when their “care package window opens.” If you received one on, say, September 15, then on November 15 you become entitled to another 20 kg (about 44 lb) of food and essential items from your relatives. And then there’s the most important thing: an extended family visit. Four times a year for a prisoner in the general-regime colony (a standard-security penal colony). Once every three months, your relatives can come, and you get to be with them not through glass and a phone, but — what bliss — in person. Three days before the visit, I caught myself sitting in the kitchen (a.k.a. the “dining room”) in the barracks with a mug of tea, looking at the empty stool beside me and imagining Yulia sitting there while I carried on a conversation with her in my head. Like, I’ll tell her this, and she’ll answer that, and then I’ll make this joke, and she’ll laugh. It’s a mild, pleasant way of losing your mind. The closer the visit gets, the more agitated you become. You write down on a piece of paper what you want to talk about and what questions you want to ask, so you won’t forget anything important. _________________________ On visiting days, time seems to stop and drag unbearably slowly—as if some higher powers are teasing you and laughing. And then suddenly—finally: “Navalny, get ready for your visit.” Right now I’m writing this sitting in the actual visiting room kitchen (with a stove!). Yulia is still asleep in our room, and I went to make some coffee and fry us some eggs with bacon. Nice, right? Really nice. In five hours it’ll be “Navalny, get ready,” all over again—and I’ll start a new countdown.