"I have begun to fantasize about color. I want to live in a rainbow house, wear bright colors and work as a paint chip girl in the local home improvement store. I have even formulated a new color theory: God didn't make no clash.

Perhaps my perspective has shifted from a studied good taste to crayola jewel-tones because I live in a very white world. Everything is painted white and is bathed in a pasty fluorescent glow.

In my cell, firmly attached to the wall, hunkers a 5-foot fluorescent light. When I first arrived at Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, I nearly broke my index finger and then thumb, pushing a silver button on the side of the light that did not switch off the light. Bemused acquaintances stood at my door and watched as I fought with this cutting edge modern technology.

We had heard repeatedly for the previous year that FCCW was a state-of-art prison, I reasoned, therefore, that the light was a new-fangled device with some clever mechanism for its switch. I even tried clapping my hands. My compadres, with some spicy teasing, urged me to even more creative, lateral and patently futile, thinking to find a way to turn off the light. I never did figure it out. Someone had to explain it to me. Several times.

The light does not go off. Ever. Not even when the bulb blows, as I discovered one Friday. The light strobed unevenly, intermittently, steadily until Monday when the bulb was finally replaced. This I can tell you: Perpetual strobing light is not conducive to well-ordered decent thoughts. Nor sleep.

The 5-foot-long implacable, everpresent fluorescent light has illuminated some of my darker thoughts. While scrubbing the walls of my cell, I have accidentally poured water (buckets) over it. It is, however, as the manufacturer undoubtedly boasts, indestructible. But there is also one sly design construct that holds me back at 2:30 in the morning when I can't bear the piercing blaze on my eyeballs one more second--the light is also our source of electricity. Our fans, our TVs, our lives are plugged into it. So if, due to light exposure, I turned into the Incredible Hulk and managed to rip the light from the wall, my TV wouldn't work. My roommate's TV wouldn't work. The light is safe.

It's interesting to me how that light--consistent, unfaltering, ever-present light--affects us. We can fight against it--deny it--or give way gracefully and adapt to it. Even the dark and stubborn, like myself, finally figure out that failing to live by the light, we short circuit the very power that gives rainbow colors to our lives." (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, July 29, 2004).

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. She is serving a 90 year sentence as an accessory to the murder of her parents in 1985. This column is part of a series, under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'