Eighteenth Day

Somehow I expected them to come and confiscate the last few pages. Going over them again today, seeing them unanswered, doubles the solitude.
I would like to see daylight. The torpor, the nausea, the anxiety, the restlessness – I’m sure just seeing a natural, living thing of some sort by the light of the day would make me feel immensely better.
I’ve spent all of today wading in limbo again. The things on which I come to dwell are growing increasingly wild, fantastic, aberrant. Yet they all seem to draw towards a uniform, focused end these days: my freedom, my return.
I started thinking of the things I would do when I’d get out. It’s humbling to be kept here like this: when I walked in I was quite certain that the clichés of detention wouldn’t apply to me. No. Me and my superior intellect would while the time away in good company, and not let ourselves be overruled by emotion under any circumstances. A kept diary, a careful scrutiny and analysis of each entry, a bit of criticism of my own, poor writings would keep us amused and out of the reach of the mediocre bureaucratic minds and their little games. I thought my boredom an elevated, peaceful sort of tranquility: Oh no, not I. I wasn’t scared. Lord no. Bored, that’s all. You, know – takes a lot to get to me.
Am I lowering myself if I confess that, against my proud wishes, I feel this incarceration will have an effect upon my future life? Is it weak to admit that I am shaken and not half as nonchalant as I’m pretending to be when I write? Would I be reacting like the average insignificant idiot if I decided now that when I get out, I’m going to do things better, and enjoy my freedom? If, so to say, I were to have experienced some sort of epiphany in my confinement? Like these mediocre anonyms selling the story of how their lives changed when they lost a leg to cheap tabloid papers?
Oh no, not I. I will keep an independent, nonchalant mind. I will not let it affect me. Change my life? How so? Why should it? Hardly even worth mentioning, that absurd little incident. Forty-two days of solitary confinement? As I said, it takes a lot more to get to me. How I survived? Oh, simply, by keeping a diary.
My God, who the hell am I kidding? Did I seriously think I was some sort of superhuman, capable of withstanding one of the oldest known mental tortures by the sheer power of my Oxbridgean mind? They say some people used to recite poetry in Auschwitz and that that kept them alive. I want to know how many PhD’s died shitting themselves there to get the stats right.
Sooo…dear reader to be, you may pride yourself on the efficiency of your techniques. I am scared to death, yes, and I smell of it. More scared than if I just feared the eventuality of my guilty participation in a terrorist plot as an unwitting agent, as I hear is often the case; more so than if I just feared the danger my family is in if I have indeed been used in such a way, and if whoever used me realizes I have suddenly disappeared; more so than if my fear were simply a matter of rational apprehension: you have reduced me to my sore body and my raving, impressionable mind. Each day I anxiously survey your progress from the rapidly thinning promontory of reason: how much time did I spend lying on the ground like a corpse today? Oh yes, that’s it: about twice as long as two days ago, when last week I used to sit, mainly. How long since I’ve actually slept through an entire night and got up in the morning? Mmm…can’t remember, really – should probably have done those push-ups. How many times a day, on average, do I sit on or crouch by the toilet because of my churning guts, when I eat practically nothing? Today more than yesterday and yesterday more than the day before.
This diary is a heap of shit, you know why? I spend about 20 minutes a day writing in it, and it says nothing about the rest. So, dear reader to be, if you want a real sneak-peek into me, why don’t you just watch the CCTV tapes? It’s not like I’m pretending anymore, sat like a good child on the tip of my bed. Go ahead, have a look, enjoy your good work, look at what you can do to people. Pretty cool, eh? Yes, yes, very powerful. Good job.