Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

life in what I call the real world. It seemed to be a chain of events that flowed one into another, not always seamlessly but at least naturally. There is
nothing
natural about my current situation. Nothing flows—or even
moves
—without someone applying a tremendous amount of willpower to one of reality’s pressure points. Even then, it’s like trying to keep a beach ball aloft just by blowing on it. Life without momentum is not truly life. A person needs movement, or they eventually begin to forget that they even exist.
    I’ve read stories in which bliss, through some bizarre form of emotional alchemy, becomes lethargy or malaise. Perhaps it’s the boredom that causes a prince to give up all he knows and become a beggar. I can’t say. What I began to wonder is if the opposite may be true—if by following the thread of pain to a deep enough level, I could find something else. I knew I wasn’t the first to wonder about such a thing, because in certain Native American tribes, the men would sometimes undergo tremendously painful ordeals in search of spiritual or psychic insight.
    One of the most torturous and well-known paths to opening the senses wider than usual is fasting. On my first attempt, I went for two weeks without consuming anything but water. For the first four days or so the pain of hunger, combined with the physical deterioration, was maddening. My skin was hot with fever. It reminded me of the powerful periods of fever and sickness that would come upon me suddenly as a child. There would be no warning; I would just wake up in the middle of the night with a high fever. I would be so weak that I couldn’t move, but it felt like I was floating. I could feel currents of energy passing through my consciousness, and realized they were always flowing through the world, but that I could feel them only when I was in that fevered state. The closest I can come to articulating it even now would be to say that I could hear a river of pink voices. Once I became a teenager, it stopped. During the very last fit, my fever went so high that my mother submerged me in a tub of ice-cold water in order to bring it down. The touch of that ice water on my skin was one of the most horrific experiences of my life. I wanted to scream and fight, but could only lie there gasping. I couldn’t even cry. My mother kept muttering reassurances to me and smoothing my hair out of the way as she poured the frigid water over my face. I kept thinking,
How can she not know that I’m in hell?
The fever never bothered me. It was comforting in a way. It was the ice water that I thought was going to kill me.
    While fasting I would fall asleep fevered, hungry, and exhausted, but I was closer to that current than I had been since childhood. Still, there was something separating me from it. I could hear it on the horizon like a distant train whistle, but I wasn’t
experiencing
it. I needed something else to bring me closer.
    I don’t know why I started running. I don’t even
remember
starting; I was suddenly just doing it. Being trapped in a cell meant I had to run in place, so that’s what I did. I ran so hard that I lost all track of time. Eventually, I passed out. The world just went black, and sounds seemed to be coming from the far end of a very long hallway. I did it again the next day, only this time I put on two pairs of socks, because of the blisters on my feet. I ran until I found myself crawling toward the toilet on my hands and knees, retching and dry-heaving as I slipped in my own sweat. What should have been horrible was somehow beautiful. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I felt closer to all things divine than I ever did in any church. I had run for over two hours without stopping for so much as a drink of water, and I had discovered a new world.
    By the third day, my feet had started bleeding, leaving little smudges and droplets all over the floor, but I wouldn’t even notice them until later. I don’t understand how there can be magick in the repetitive movement of the body, but I’ve found it.
    There are times when my mind screams at my body to stop, that it’s not possible to go for one more second. I ignore it and push beyond that point. Only by pushing beyond every boundary that my mind and body pose can I swim in the dark, deep waters that I need. That’s the place where anything worth having comes from. It’s the pain of destroying my boundaries that lets me scan the current for