SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

Day 36.3 Sunday, December 24, 2017

Today is Christmas Eve, and I am totally, utterly miserable. I tried to bring food to Craig to eat, but each time I did, I would knock, gain no response from behind the cellar door, leave the food plate at the foot of the door, and come back hours later to find that the food plate was still sitting outside the door, still intact. I had called out from behind the door that I was leaving Craig food to eat, 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 of the cellar, but the boys were still drunk on the supplies of alcohol they had already brought up for themselves before the time Craig locked the alcoholic cellar, and they 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.

I ate my food early today for I was feeling sick, and I immediately 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 title Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. The author, Sam Harris, was a neuroscientist and taught me as I read to try meditating by listening to the sounds around me and to my breath. I tried to recognize my thoughts as merely passersby across the freeway of my mind, and I tried to escape the idea that was my sense of self. I sought to exit the strategy of using this current moment as a vessel and as a means to a future goal, and tried to just experience the current time as a time to simply be experienced. I managed to relax a bit, and to capture this moment consciously by experiencing my hearing of the sounds of the ocean water coming through the window, the feeling and smell of the crisp sea salt air, the sight of the mild silver sunlight peering in through the window, and the taste of the air as it wrapped around my face like a coiling snake. I gave this relaxation technique a good try, and indeed I did find a oneness for the world, a sense of love in myself for all things that I could only imagine as a near equivalent effect 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 completely overwhelmed me and I could not manage to separate my thoughts from the abstract being that I thought was myself. (The 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 my rhomboid region of my back between and beneath my scapula, my shoulder blades. I had awoken not to the pain thought, but to the sounds, of shouting upstairs. I then heard a piercing scream, and I saw an enormous shadow fall over my room—I looked over on the carpet, and saw through the window the most horrifying, screaming thing--

Out my window, a body falling.