As I lay there in an empty room, with empty feelings, stillness wrapping me like a soft blanket, I stared at the shadows cast by the curtains by the feeble light coming through the window. My mind played tricks on me, turning it into a self-made little game. I realized it might as well be the beginning of my end. Maybe I was very close to it. I could feel that it might get over anytime soon.

I had heard somewhere that a person cannot survive four days without food, and I had only had one or two bloody pears in the past few days. Maybe death will come to me gradually in my sleep like a car light strolling casually through the curtain shadows, disrupting that magical symmetry. Maybe I wouldn’t feel it when it comes. Just as I couldn’t feel the night gradually drifting towards the day, it felt like time had stopped for me.

I shuffled on my bed restlessly, forcing sleep to come to me, but there had been no exercise at all, and I wasn’t tired, so I remained sleep-deprived. So many hours to go before another day, and so many more days before I could get out of this nightmare, this hellhole, where I couldn’t be a person anymore.

All I imagined, tried desperately to picture, were good times; the only thing that kept me going. I knew someone waited for me outside the tunnel, where a faint light peeped through. I knew someone was sharing my grief, even though they were free, they were still clouded by my depressive plight. If there were any fight left in me, it would be entirely for them.

“All of this would be over soon.”

I never lost hope, not even for a second, but there were moments of despair, and I shed my fair share of silent tears onto the pillow, imagining the horrors of my disappearance and how it would affect those I loved. It was devastating. In those rare moments when I cried, to a world that slept peacefully at night, I remained an inconsequential mote, much like to the God who had turned their back on me, just as I had once when I incessantly declared myself an atheist.

The last day of my three-month Lent always felt like a faraway dream that I could never reach. It felt impossible, and yet possible, if I fed myself even a morsel of the fruit that I didn’t like, and a little bit of hope even as despair closed in on me within those tightening four walls.

My silver linings painted a picture for me everywhere I looked. I would pat myself, as if an angel with my face existed in the room, brushing my hair with love and saying,

“Hang in there. This is a test. God sees it all. Life after this will be the best. You will get everything you ever wanted.”

And I hung in there with self-created hope, tied to a self-imagined non-existent angel, nothing but a figment of my imagination, one of the many games that I had created to pass time while everyone I knew, and everyone I didn’t, slept comfortably in their beds, untouched by my unbearable sorrow.

Little did I know that the boy who lived, who scoured for every breath, was about to carry PTSD from the things he had to endure. Had I known earlier, I would have become that angel and rightfully appeared in front of him and hugged him to let him know that I was real, that I wasn’t just a concocted game, that I was sent by none other than God, who watches you closely and marvels at your peerless strength.

You shall live.