It was my own war. It was daily. It was hourly. Sometimes it was just to get through the moment, the hour. My whole world melted around me. Everything that I loved and had lived for was in another world. I was separated by the ocean, by the airplane. The abyss that I had fallen into, the corner that I inhabited, the loss and the terror were two separate monsters that took their turns strangling and suffocating me. i could not look at pictures of my friends or of Siabonga, neither could I call them. I could speak to them when they called. I could hear their voices coming from that world that I had once been a part of and I could hear my voice speaking to them. The air around was stiff, made of immovable iron and steel. The walls that I breathed through had no entrance and exist. I could hear my voice. I could hear their voices. There was penetration but the walls did not budge and the echo from that world tormented me. It was the reminder of everything that I lost, everything that had been taken from me. Words came out and like butterflies that would never be mine to see or to draw. They came out from my spirit and from my heart. I loved them. I loved them deeply. I was afraid of the pain that would come if they forgot me, if they did not call, if they let me alone in this invisibility that was beyond darkness. I cried, locked and chained to the stakes and to the acid and to the knives and I hid nothing from them. If they were to come with me then I would spare from them nothing. They were my friends and I trusted them with my life.

Liat stayed by my side. She guarded the invisible and endless hole that I fell into. If she could not see, she could feel me into the depth of my cells. She guarded the abyss and stayed guard. She handed the job over to none. She was my angel. She was dedicated to me and her presence became a life-line. Through her I remembered who I was. Through her I could embrace myself, find compassion for my suffering, find beauty even if they were just threads. They were threads connecting me to who I used to be, to who I knew would never be taken away from me. When Liat and I spoke, I felt and heard myself reflected in her patience, in her compassion, in her soft and gentle dedication. I felt my deepest spiritual self rise above the terror and the desperation to meet her. And wherever I met her, I met myself. What I saw was so beautiful, so powerful, it was something to live for, it was something to fight for, it was something to believe in. The life sentence that I had been sentenced to was a reason to die. It was a reason to die now. Liat's devotion was an angel's voice that came from another realm. I could hear her clearly, as though the divide of our two worlds was not so great at all, as though the world that I inhabited was the same world that she inhabited, as though I had not gone completely insane. I learnt her voice more and more. I knew when she would call. I could not call her but I always received her calls. When despair had eaten my will to live like maggots at a fresh corpse, I spoke to her. My mother would come to give me the phone, her eyes with the light of salvation in them. She thanked Liat every time she called. It was beyond thanking. It was a gratitude that went to a higher source. When we spoke we thanked God that we had found each other. We thanked God that we were in each others lives. We told each other that we did not know what we would do if we were not in each others lives. Our gratitude was to a higher source, a source that felt present when we spoke to each other, a source we felt that was beyond us, whose power had united us. A source that we spoke of, in the language of gratitude, self-acceptance and devotion. If I was dead then she was there to remind me that there was nothing dead about me. If I was hopeless then she was there to remind me that there was so much ahead for me. If I was as useful as a dead man that never died but stayed forever suffocating then to me she was my best friend that stayed by my side while I suffocated constantly reminding me that my soul was there untouched by the senselessness and insanity that my body was submitting me to. Her beauty was something to live for, and my idea that her beauty was a reflection of my own gave me the strength to fight for the hope that one day the torture chambers would slow their frenzied insanity and I would be set free from the chains, free from the repetitive daily, hourly minute to minute massacre of my will to live.
If there was blood, it went unseen. It was as invisible as the crocodile teeth that were clenched to my vagina, invisible as my flesh twisting and torn to shreds, raw and wrenched, brutalized and shoved into a deathless and repetitive corridor of insanity. I dreamed of death. I was jealous of death itself. To be granted death meant to be loved by a God of mercy. There was no mercy in the plane of this existence. There was no mercy at all. There was a kaleidoscope of nightmares and terrors and the endless obsession with death and the torment of knowing that I would have to chose a way to do it. My mind winded around itself. There was nothing left of it but the spiraling images of me in the act of taking my own life. The thoughts spiraled and they spiraled and twisted and chiseled themselves into my brain as the knives plunged hundreds and thousands of time into the depths of my vagina. I wanted to be killed once, To be tortured once, to be allowed to bleed so that the life would bleed itself out of me naturally and my suffering would end. I was sentenced to be destroyed over and over again. I was losing my mind. There was nothing else. I was losing my identity. Who I was and what I was now added up to nothing. Whatever I had fought for, whatever i had believed, the coherence and the meaning that was such a huge part of the life I had lived, were like tickets to a carnival that had never existed. And yet I was holding the tickets, swearing that the carnival was taking place. I knew that it was because I had lived it, I had created it. The black hole ridiculed me. The spiraling broken machine that twisted itself through my brain that had turned into stiff and drying glue, the chasm between the world that I had inhabited and the world that I was sentenced to now was as real as two galaxies winding on different orbits. They would never meet. And if they met it would be only by crashing into each other. And then the victory of death will be a morbid and ugly tragedy that my family and my friends would have to live with for the rest of their lives. In this world the only gateway was an imagined one that existed in my mind in the future. I knew that when I lost that, I would be ready to accept that my fate was to take the life out of my own body.