As the great wound inside me continued to heal, Tong was released and left the Island. He was kind enough to leave a present for me in the place where we usually met. By this present, I knew I would no longer see him. It was a bundle of dried fish with a note inside that read:
“I am gone, but I hope we will meet again. In the meantime I will be thankful for your help and your friendship.”
At the moment I read this note I felt grateful, but I also felt alone again. Not even the beauty of the island could comfort me: the shifting blues of sea and sky, the corn and tomatoes that hung soundlessly in my garden.
For the remainder of that year I fought to maintain myself without help from anyone. There were even times I would have welcomed a beating from the guard, my old friend. But he was nowhere to be found, and it should be said in all honesty that I did not try very hard to find him.
There were many things I learned during that last year on the island. The most important of these were the following:
To know one’s self is to learn one’s relationship to the nothing--the void that lines every experience of silence.
Meaning lives in every existent thing, and we ourselves are the experience of that meaning.
To think is to experience the life inside the life we live out while in human form.
I determined that matter was not an illusion, rather it is a means by which the invisible experiences itself as mass, density and form.
Most importantly of all, I realized that the effort to understand myself and the world around me was the very thing that allowed me to keep myself sane.