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3035 Joe GarciaDuring that time, I heard tracks from %u201cRed,%u201d Swift%u2019s fourth studio album, virtually every hour. I was starting to enjoy them. Laying on the top bunk, I would listen to my cellmate%u2019s snores and wait for %u201cWe Are Never Ever Getting Back Together%u201d to come around again. When it did, I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years, before prison. I remembered bittersweet times when my sweetheart had visited me in county jail. We%u2019d look at each other through security glass that was reinforced by wire. It didn%u2019t seem fair to expect her to wait for me, and I told her that she deserved a partner who could be with her. But we didn%u2019t use the word %u201cnever,%u201d and deep down I always hoped that we%u2019d get back together. When I heard %u201cEverything Has Changed,%u201d I had to fight back tears of exaltation and grief. Swift sings, %u201cAll I knew this morning when I woke / Is I know something now / Know something now I didn%u2019t before.%u201d I thought back to our first date, and how we had talked and laughed late into the night. We had to force ourselves to get a few hours of sleep before sunrise.After several months, my belongings, including my CD player, finally caught up with me. I was getting ready to buy %u201cRed%u201d from a catalogue of approved CDs when I learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., had placed me on another transfer list. I didn%u2019t want the album to get stuck at the prison after I had been transferred, so I resorted to a country station that regularly featured Swift. Sometimes, hearing Southern drawls and honky-tonk medleys, I%u2019d laugh out loud at myself. But that was the station that played the widest variety of her music, from %u201cTim McGraw%u201d to %u201cI Knew You Were Trouble.%u201d There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of 5happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.Hitting a new yard%u2014in this case, the prison known as the California Men%u2019s Colony (C.M.C.)%u2014means finding new friends and allies. Each table and workout area was claimed by a different gang or ethnic group. I%u2019m Asian and Hispanic, and I chose to join the Asians in a cement workout area. When they asked me what kind of music I liked, I confessed that I was anxiously waiting for a Taylor Swift album. Everyone laughed. %u201cOh, my God, we%u2019ve got a Swiftie on the yard!%u201d Lam, a muscular guy, told me. %u201cYou in touch with your sensitive side? Are you gay?%u201d He especially loved to heckle me in front of his buddy Hung, who spoke little and laughed almost silently.I was waiting for %u201cRed%u201d to arrive when I saw Swift perform %u201cAll Too Well%u201d at the 2014 Grammys. That became the song that I played first when I peeled the plastic wrap off the disc, and the song I%u2019d stop at and repeat whenever I spun the album. (Her ten-minute version is even better.) As Swift sang about love%u2019s magical moments, how they are found and lost again, I thought about a time before my incarceration, when I briefly broke up with the woman I loved. She came to my house to return one of my T-shirts. When she hung it on the doorknob and walked away, I was on the other side. I sensed that someone was there, but, by the time I opened the door, she was gone.When %u201cRed%u201d arrived, I finally found out why Lam had been clowning me in front of Hung. %u201cRed%u201d was the only Swift CD that Hung didn%u2019t own%u2014because he considered it a misguided pop departure from the country greatness of %u201cFearless%u201d and %u201cSpeak Now.%u201d Eventually, Lam outed himself as a Swiftie, too. For six months, the three of us would work out and debate which album was best. Then Hung transferred out of the prison, taking his CDs with him.Around the time Swift dropped %u201c1989,%u201d I acquired an old-school boom box. Technically, Why do you think Swift%u2019s music made Garcia exchanging property and altering devices is emotional in paragraph 4?22Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.