The desert

Today I felt an icy loneliness invade me and decided to do shadow work on it.

I remembered the feeling of void, of icy-cold emptiness. The room was literally freezing cold. My room was always the coldest room in the house. But I had gotten a sense of comfort in that cold void of emptiness: the kind of comfort that you start feeling when you're so used to something that you have convinced yourself there is nothing else. It was a calm free fall into black void: it was familiar and comfortable while at the same time sharp as a freezing blade penetrating slowly my soul. I had only two things at the time. The first thing was my painting. I spent the isolated nights painting whatever came out of my mind. Then one day I got a computer as a present: it was a substitute for love from my parents, and I started to get extremely attached to the computer. I started to treat it like a friend, like someone I loved, because it was the only stimulation I got. I remember people in my class thought I was a computer savant, but the reality is that I learned so much about computers because I had no-one else to learn from. I spent all of my time discovering all of the secrets of that machine, trying to unfold it as though I was looking for the person hiding behind all those secret codes. I learned all the codes, I learned how to program it, how to deprogram it, how to hack it, as though somehow by learning those codes I would finally find the person behind it, and connect to another human. That was the real reason I became so good at computers. So I sat in that bleeding cold void, in that empty room. I sank deeper into the pain and was catapulted back into my childhood. I'm only a few years old, and I'm walking in the suffocating heat of a white, infinite desert. I don't see the end of it through the horizon, blurred by the heat. I keep walking and there is nothing, but the white hard ground of the desert. I'm just dreaming, but the dream is a reflection of my life - and it got to the point where I couldn't remember what was real from what was dream because I was always alone, there was no-one around. In the dream the desert is hard and cracking under my feet, made of boiling sand. I know there is no end, I will be walking forever in the desert, and so my life feels that way. The people around me are not real, they're just robots. In my dreams I see their faces melt away because there is nothing behind them. In reality I know they're just not there. I don't know where they are but they are not there. Their bodies are there like a robot doing whatever needs to be done for the day, but they're not there. I am alone in a desert of my house. Finally I step into the dream desert with my adult self. For a while I start walking with my child self, side by side, in the desert. After quite some time she turns towards me and starts smiling. She realizes there is a new friend, and she starts to play with me. We play for some time and then I ask her if now that she has a friend in her dream, she wants to go back to reality. She says 'no'. She wants to stay in the desert dream with me, for now.

The picture is a painting of the desert I made a while ago, while in that feeling.