Alone again. Piper found herself alone, trapped in the tiny hell hole that was a cell in the SHU. She was trapped in with only her thoughts. All of her time was spent thinking about the past few weeks. About how things had been so perfect, and then had crashed and burned. How she had led Larry on, even after she knew that she couldn't be with him, and about how she kept hurting Alex, the one person who would always love her. She promised herself that no matter what it took, she would never abuse Alex's unfaltering love ever again.
In SHU it's hard to differentiate days from nights, hallucinations from nightmares, and mostly who you were from who this place was turning you into. After a few weeks the screams stopped being a nuisance to Piper and began to be soothing. When she found the courage to sleep, the screams of her fellow inmates became her lullabies. She stopped worrying about when she would get out, in her mind she thought that Dogget must have died and that in return she would die, alone in the cell, never getting to live her life with Alex. Whenever she thought of that beautiful woman she would momentarily forget her surroundings, she could close her eyes and feel Alex's lips on hers, feel their loving embraces, when she thought of Alex she was momentarily able to forget how terrified she was.
Three months. Three months passed Piper by before she got to see another human face. Right when Piper had given up all hope that she would ever get out, the big metal door to her cell opened and O'Neil was staring her in the face. "Chapman up! We're taking you back to camp today. But you better keep yourself in line or you will never see the light of day again." Piper was shocked, her legs felt like wet noodles and her heart was fluttering to the beat of a mockingbirds wings. It took O'Neil threatening to leave her in the cell for her to muster up the strength to stand and walk towards the guard. She was finally going home, the only home she wanted, to Alex.
When she got back to camp it was in the middle of the day, all of her fellow inmates were at work, so O'Neil told her to shower and go to laundry to get a fresh pair of khakis, she had lost so much weight in the SHU that hers looked like they were swallowing her whole. Piper had never missed showering so much in her life, even the luke warm water of the E dorm showers felt like a magnificent flowing hot tub. Once she had showered and been issued a new uniform Fischer took her to her new bunk, a new inmate had been assigned to her bunk in the ghetto while she was in the SHU. She was now in the suburbs with all of her friends, but she couldn't help but think how she would miss Taystee and her loud rants.
While waiting for her friends to return from work so that she could catch up on all that she had missed, Piper laid down in her bed, feeling like the metal frame with the tiny flat mattress was the most comfortable place in the world. For the first time in months she drifted off into a peaceful sleep. She dreamed of Alex.