tribute

Original date 3 September 2011

I have attempted to chip at the walls of my cell, but even I knew there was nothing I could do. In my attempts, all I have accomplished was to wear my nails down until the tips of my fingers bled.

The only thing left to do was sit in my cell and try to hold onto my sanity.

This was my sole mission: to not let my solitary confinement drive me to madness. I could let it harden me, I could let it toughen me, but I must not let it make me crazy.

It's a strange challenge, staying sane. If you focus too hard on maintaining your sanity, the slipperiness of the task can only make you crazier.

On the other hand, if you forget your mission, if you try to maintain your sanity by not thinking about the matter at all, you can find your mind wandering in such dizzying patterns that you wind up, again, at madness.

The trick is to forge a middle ground between the two: a detachment, a state of neutrality.

I focused on breathing. In. Out. In. Out.  Just breathe.  I found this to be my lifeline, the best way for me to
keep my sanity.

And so days and weeks turned into months and months turned into a year.

What was hardest was the absence of sunlight, the endless immersion in darkness. Sometimes I'd lose track of where my body ended and the darkness began. I'd lose sense of my own existence, my own borders. I was a cloud of ink in the night. Black on black.

The urge to survive had gone dormant in me. I lived not because I wanted to but because I had to...for Brian.

I had been without him so long at this point that I would have given anything for another moment with him, even if he had to suffer unimaginable torments for it. I wanted him back.

I would stand in front of the mirror. The girl who stared back at me was almost unrecognizable. I'm hardly even that girl anymore.

I would stare at myself for a long time, standing alone, unattended, unaccompanied, aching for Brian, aching for a worthy tribute to him.

It's right there, though. In the new hardness and definition of her face. Her love and loss is etched forever in the firm set of her jaw.

I am his tribute. Living is my gift to him.