He has said that for four days after Cordoba died, he considered ending his life. He has attributed the decision not to do so to his faith — to the belief that suicide would prevent him from entering heaven, and to the memory of his mother’s words about this. Whatever the specific content of the thought process in those four days, the decision he arrived at was to continue.
Continuing meant resuming the cycle of activities that sustained him: catching food, collecting water, watching the sky, tracking the moon. It also meant reconstructing some form of mental life that could sustain itself in the absence of any other person. The strategies he had used while Cordoba was alive — the imagined meals, the conversations with God, the mental trips to places he remembered — became the entire architecture of his social existence rather than a supplement to actual human company.
He has described, in various accounts, imagining the world he had left behind in enough detail to make it feel present. Specific foods prepared in specific ways. People he knew, doing things he associated with them. The smell of particular places. The texture of particular experiences. These mental reconstructions were vivid enough, in some accounts, to be confused with reality — to be mistaken, in moments of exhaustion, for actual perception.
The distinction between deliberate mental construction and hallucination is not always sharp under the conditions of extreme isolation and sleep deprivation. What can be said is that Alvarenga maintained enough grip on the distinction to function — to keep caring for himself, to keep tracking time, to keep gathering food and water. The mental strategies, whatever their precise character, did not interfere with the practical work of survival. They supported it.