I was back in prison.
How did I get there?
I didn’t know.
I should have been, I suspected, on bail but somehow I’d been transported into prison with a terrible question throbbing in my brain.
How did I get there?
It was not a normal prison.
Men and women of varying shapes and sizes were lying or seated in what I imagined a refugee camp to be, rather than a prison.
Many seemed confused, dazed, and groaning with a suffering I could not understand.
Someone suddenly appeared.
He was delivering mail and it brought an eagerness that invaded every inmates dead eyes.
He gave me a parcel.
It was from a friend with whom I had shared many a dangerous moment.
He had sent me a 9-ounce bar of marijuana.
I quickly, furtively, scrapped the contents into a bag, grateful for his understanding of my situation.
I put the parcel in an old chest of drawers that I recognized as one belonging to my ex wife.
This observation of an expensive pine chest of drawers in a prison, surprisingly, did not bother me.
I was grateful for the marijuana, thinking it would be able to buy me enough to stay alive, but how did my friend know where I was and I did not.
Why this sense of incarceration?
I determined to approach the authorities as to my status.
I had no recollection of an arrest, though my conscience was unclear.
And anyway where were the warders?
I was conscious of a dwarf talking constantly in my ear.
He was telling me the score.
I sensed he knew of the marijuana, but he gave me the confidence to wander, to wander.
I explored the territory.
Here was a close friend from my youth weeping.
He had given up hope.
He was no one specifically and yet everyone I knew.
He had been there for 7 years he told me.
I walked on.
A woman I knew called me, offering advice.
It made me angry and I turned away from her.
Although I did not understand she seemed to plead with me.
She reminded me of a small study group I attended.
Suddenly she metamorphosed, became all the women I had ever known, as one.
Yes!
It gave me an irrational hope that though imprisoned I was near the town where this small group met once a year.
The recollection of the deep impression these meetings left on me somehow seemed associated with my present condition.
I had to get out.
But how did one escape from a prison with no walls?
Then I realized.
I had to seek, he who had led me there.
This man did not lie, in the light, but the shadow.
He was hidden from the sun by my own body.
My manifestation contained and hid his presence.
It was the mask that held me here in this hell.
I looked round at the sad pitiful pleading eyes of those on the ground.
I was standing.
Indeed I realized I was the only one in that world who could stand on two feet.
Only because I had enough ‘will’ to wish too.
It was then I began my search.
