dear susan. 1970 has now passed into 1971. you can drift in here and never know you're gone. you can fade so far out and you don't know where you are anymore or where anything else is.
i find loneliness is a physical pain which hurts all over; you can't isolate it in one part of your body. i so much need your softness, your strength. i have your letters. they charge me, give me courage.news about amnesty and getting out - tangled, complicated.
 in the daytimes we sometimes play volleyball against the big turkish gangsters.
to the turks all foreigners are "ayip" - unclean, dirty. we don't shave our under-arms or around our crotch.
and you're never supposed to eat with your left hand. you know why? because that's what they use to wipe their asses with instead of toilet paper. and yet they hate pigs. there are no pigs in turkey. they're considered dirty.
it happened to be a new guard that day and he didn't understand the system.
a week later aslan had a new gun.
i know all this must sound crazy to you, but this place is crazy.
dear susan. poor jimmy was caught and beaten so badly he got a severe hernia and lost a testicle. he's been in the hospital for months having operations.
i have problems with my stomach and my leg muscles feel very weak. my gums seem to be shrinking and they sometimes bleed when i massage them.  they've pulled five of my teeth.
sometimes they null the wrong one.
even masturbation has become boring. it teaches you, like the rest of prison life, to seal up your emotions, and this is the greatest danger, this is what makes so many of the men change into something monstrous.
dear susan. erich has been transferred to a prison back in sweden. he has profoundly affected my life and though i am lonely without him i am calmer than ever.
though i only have 53 days left, i feel i have never been so well adjusted to prison and to living as now.
poor jimmy.
he still talks of escape.
dear susan. it's taken me a long time to find out that it's got to stop somewhere. i've learned painfully not to trust the turks, the courts, the lawyers, the consul, the united states government, and not even my loving parents. there is only one way out of here.  the midnight express.