SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

DAY 36.3

Sunday, December 23, 2017

T

oday is Christmas Eve, and I am totally, utterly miserable. I tried to bring food to the cellar for Craig to eat, but each time I did, I would knock, gain no response, leave the food plate at the door, and return hours later to find the food plate untouched. I called out to Craig, but Craig would not come out at all to retrieve my gift of sustenance. I then retreated to the fourth floor to beg the other boys to help me bring food to the exiled Craig who had presumably locked himself in the cellar to keep the rest of the boys out, but the boys were still drunk on the supplies of alcohol they had already collected. They also stayed true to their malicious pact to ignore me completely. I was shut out from the social sphere of this bay house prison, and it was beginning to take its toll on my mental and emotional state.

Today I ate my food early because I was feeling sick. I ran downstairs to my third-floor bedroom where Jack no longer slept with me, and chose to read a book I had found in the second-floor library to pass the time and potentially save my spirit. The book was titled Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. The author, Sam Harris, was a neuroscientist and taught me to try meditation by listening to my breathing and to the sounds around me. I tried to recognize my thoughts as mere passersby across the freeway of my mind, and I tried to erase my sense of self. I sought to avoid using this current moment as a means to a future goal, and tried to go through the current time as a time to simply be experienced.

I managed to relax a bit. I captured this moment consciously. The sounds of the ocean water wafted through the window. The smell of the crisp sea salt air, the sight of the silver sunlight, which bounced across the white walls, and the taste of the air as it wrapped around my tongue like a blanket, melted my nerves.

I gave this relaxation technique a good try. Indeed I found a oneness with the world, a sense of love in myself for all things that I could only imagine as a near equivalent to the effects of ecstasy (which I swear I had never tried, especially not when I went to Coachella and danced without inhibition to the sad sweet tones and moans of Lana Del Rey), but my thoughts kept streaming in, one worse than the other, before they overwhelmed me. I failed to separate my thoughts from the abstract being that I thought was myself. (Sam Harris's book is deep, I hardly get it yet—much thanks to my waking starvation.)

I managed to fall asleep on the floor, and woke up to a pain in the rhomboid region between my scapulae. Shouts upstairs woke me. I heard a scream, and an enormous shadow fall over my room. I turned to find the most terrifying thing—

Past my window—a figure falling.