He stepped up onto the edge of his bed and peered into the open bucket. "The lowering of the colors," he said as he unbuttoned his tattered trousers and dropped them around his ankles. He aimed his penis with his right hand and held his left high overhead like a conductor about to set his orchestra in motion. His head was cocked to one side as though waiting for some starting signal. He began to relieve himself a split second after the muezzin began the evening call to prayer. The sound of his urination, exaggerated by his elevation, splashed loudly into the hollow bucket and echoed beyond the confines of our cell into the length of the cellblock, testing even the most faithful. He struggled to keep the stream steady as he set his left hand into motion and conducted himself in a loud whistling version of 'God Save the Queen.' The urination continued, but the song faltered as his face broke into smiling laughter.

"I trust you'll torture them with your 'Star Spangled Banner' after I'm gone," he said in a chuckle as his last trickling drops landed in the bucket.

I laughed aloud, but only because he did and only because I couldn't help but enjoy his small snub. But the laughter escaping me rang hollow as it began to sink in. It was no accident that I was there. Whether through aspiration or desperation, everyone eventually finds their own level. And I knew that I had found mine.

As the days began to run into one another and time started to pile up behind me, a strange phenomenon emerged. My mind, unencumbered through hour after unending hour of idle emptiness, started, of its own volition, to pay attention and take note of every tiny detail in my surroundings. For the first few weeks, I played with my heightened senses as a novelty, passing whole days tracing every crack in the floor back upstream to its main tributary or counting my own breaths up into the thousands. It was only later that this sharpening, this intolerable sharpening, began to reveal edges to all things as though a giant lens had brought everything into a crisper, clearer focus than man had been designed to endure. Day by day, week by week the edges continued to sharpen until it seemed one blow might be enough to cleave one thing from another and shatter the entire existence around me. But that blow never comes and that unbearable clarity progresses until you begin to see your own edges against the larger background. At that point, the clarity supersedes the prison and thus becomes the object of escape.