“Prison is for real men” is an old saying we have in Syria, and one that I kept repeating to myself as I paced anxiously back and forth across my small, dingy cell in an almost hypnotic trance of meditation. Time seemed to melt and mold in that dungeon; it was an abstract entity that only existed in the world of mortal men as they went about their normal lives and daily routines. For us, the condemned and the damned, time had no meaning. The only way we measured it was in intervals of going to the interrogation room or bathroom breaks. Everything else was a fuzzy haze of being in a cell and sometimes out of it. It was a room where time stood still yet slowly oozed away. Yes, this was the edge of madness, the edge of the abyss, and I was right there on the brink.

Yeah, it’ll be alright, I thought. This is a character-building experience. I’ll emerge wiser and none the worse for wear. Occasionally, however, a terrifying thought would creep into my mind, interrupting my meditative internal monologues: “Except this kind of prison isn’t for men. It’s for animals, and it’s run by animals, too.”

It was not a question of whether one could survive; it was simply a matter of how long one could last. A hundred horror stories about Syria’s infamous gulag and tales of inmates that I’d heard about over the years would rush through my head at a million miles per second. Many of those people got out but by then were different, perhaps deranged. They’d lost an important part of themselves, a part of their soul, and they would never again be the same. What I experienced in detention was not exceptional in terms of horror or terror, and indeed, I was far luckier than many who never made it out alive or who survived but were destroyed by the experience.

A stiflingly hot, filthy and lonely room with no light fixtures and what can only be described as the remnants of two blankets and a pillow, their original color long faded into obscurity by the progress of time and, without a doubt, many a man’s sweat and tears. The windows were large, but crisscrossed with iron bars and covered with a poster, most likely depicting a great and noble quality of our leader or an equally great accomplishment by him worthy of such large print to remind us all, just in case we forgot for a moment, who was boss.