In August 2013 I was arrested and detained at the border of Washington and Canada. My hands were held behind my lower back as a young officer locked me inside a steel, windowless room. Outside, while the older, higher ranking officer raided our car, stealing food, wine, tobacco and other possessions he saw as unfit to cross an ideological line, my friend sobbed hysterically.

Nicole and I had been on our way to British Columbia to spend a week camping in the alpines when our car was stopped by Canadian border patrol. I had taken responsibility for a pipe found in our car that was dusted with the resin of a dried, Seattle cannabis flower.

After several minutes in a metal box the young officer relieved me from the cell and led me back to the front desk. He avoided my gaze, and I knew it was out of fear that his sympathy might shine through. For when our eyes did momentarily meet, I saw beneath the shell of a soldier the softness of a father.

Now, standing across from the older officer, I watched him move like a miserable machine completely unconscious of the presence of sentient beings around him. Did he know there was life in me? That there was still life left in him? Welded into a dutiful citizen of the state, he carried out his job with the type of twisted dignity that only a politics of death could produce.

Sickened by the darkness of his art, my mind drifted back to the scene of the cell. I was completely alone in a cold room, stripped and separated from everything I had ever owned. The one thing in the room other than a steel bench was a sign that listed my rights as a detainee in blood red lettering. As my eyes traced the 3^rd bullet – female subjects are to be searched by female officers – I remembered the feeling of the old officer’s cold, hard hands as they groped my body.

In the prison cell existed a stillness that made my body tingle with the feeling of eternity. And in this frozen place I reached what felt like the deepest layer of my being – calm, uncontaminated, unconditioned, alive. I found myself in a twilight zone of clarity and adrenaline –the kind that keeps you moving at a steady state of alertness and control. Suddenly anything was possible. Yes, my body was constrained behind four steel walls, but my morals and my intellect were free.

Civil disobedience, according to Thoreau, actualizes free thought and clear conscious. A prisoner of the law with nothing left to loose, I was useless to a bloodthirsty government – dead weight, worthless, and thus absolved of all civil obligation. Outside the cell, Nicole remained the subject of the states imposition – its technologies of protection, surveillance and security. Its incessant tactics of domestication, exploitation and deceit encroached upon every move she made.

As the proven enemy, my will to live, breath, and think was no longer the subject of the states manipulation. Conversely, Nicole’s ‘freedom’ made her the potential enemy, which translated to a life of rules, regulations, and fear. The laws of the state are but tools of oppression and control that create conditions of peace and pacification through normalized modes of health, education, housing, vocation, and relaxation. Nicole’s tears were the water that kept both her body and mind malleable as clay.

Edward Snowden says we are only free from total risk when we are in prison. I agree, for in prison the rules of the state no longer apply. Prisoners, as confirmed threats to society, have no rights to give up, are not worthy of protection. Their disposability emancipates them from the social contract that sucks our will for true, unfiltered thought.

She who lives under myth of freedom is in actuality the instrument of state power.

I am incredibly grateful for that evening. Because in those moments of sheer freedom, time dissolves. All that was left was eternity. And they say that a good dose of eternity can last a lifetime.