It’s a room and a desert.

You follow the trail towards the hidden door at the end, but the sand keeps brushing against your shins and you rasp and cough with each breath – air feels like heatedd sparks reaching for your throat with their white-hot hooks.

You have been promised water, or perhaps the garden at the end of the road, just behind the dune, maybe behind the other one, it’s right there, it has been promised to you, so why can’t you find it, why can’t you reach it?

Or perhaps it was something you promised yourself – a fever dream you cannot recollect. A fool’s hope.

Where is it, you keep gasping beneath the sky of polished glass, and your voice rattles against the walls of blinding white noise. No answer comes of course.

Where is your dream? How long have you fighting for it? For that garden at the end of the bridge, that place where you will find what you crave, at last? Where you will be able to rest beneath the palm trees and feel the wind caress your face gently, not like glass paper that scratches your overheated skin?

Perhaps nowhere.

There is a terrible chance a terrible possibility that the desert is all that there is.

That there is no way out. Perhaps there is no out at all.

No where else to be.

And collapsing against the side of the dune, you wonder if perhaps coming here was just an act of hubris. How many times did you repeat yourself: I can do it?

I am not like others, I have these skills, I have this chance, I have this, I have this because it is mine and I am going to put all my value inside this precious locker, inside this golden bowls of amber light and hold it close, so close, a precious seed that can never grow because if it grows it is not mine anymore and there is the chance that just a stinted plan twill grow out of it.

How many.

How many times?

You have sacrificed much (no one asked) you have sacrificed most (who cares?) you have sacrificed all (is it changing anything?) and that would be a fine thing, if this were a story, if you could just increase tension just before the climax, waiting for that garden, for that happy ending, just behind that final dune, just behind another curve. Just one.

Just one, just have faith.

Just delude yourself a little further.

At this point, as you fall against the scraping sand, heat kissing your skin with blisters, you wonder if perhaps this wasn’t the best thing you could do to yourself, if this couldn’t be your only hope: keep deluding yourself, while the world looms over you.

The world outside is not made for you, so you built yourself a room and a desert.

You are at home here, you can deal with this, this is what you are good for – that’s all you can tell yourself. After all, isn’t that true?

You have even managed to find the occasional stunted bush in the desert. It felt like hope then, it now tastes bitter like mockery now.

Nobody cares.

The pressure of the white-hot void that surrounds you make you feel like you could pop at any moment.

And then?

Nobody cares.

You are not even a stain on the world’s hide, you have barely experiences yourself, and even then only on your aching tiptoes.

Is there anything else beyond this desert? What of all of your efforts?

They tell you to follow your dreams.

Nobody tell you that dreams may lead nowhere.

Perhaps on a pane of infinite glass where you can slowly get cooked under the indifferent gaze of the sky. Perhaps that’s where all dreams go to die.

Or perhaps they continue.

Forever into the unknown, lost filigree.

And you?

You most surely don’t feel like continuing.

If you do not, the dune will claim you. Or the sun will do, boiling your blood until it’s tar and it squeezes down your ears into the thirsty silt.

What else is there for you to do? Chase the next dune?

Because the next dune is the one, for sure! The garden will be right behind there. You just can’t see it. You have to believe. You have to apply yourself.

Applying yourself, feels like bashing against a pane of most-clear glass. The rest of the world is outside, together with people who made it, who did found their garden.

How did they do it?

No idea, but they did and you DI NOT, which is the only thing that matters.

That makes you as useless as the flowing dust that spirals down the dune.

Even worse – it makes you defective, it makes you a waste of space, a mockery of a person.

Let alone someone who could one day be called an artist.

All your choices led you to this point, and guess what: all of them were absolutely wrong.

So isn’t it better to just rest your weary head on the dune? Just lay down and lay low and let the skeletal hands of time tuck its ragged blanket all around your skin?

Thus you will sleep at peace.

Knowing your failures amounted to just a blink and miss moment.

Even if there is something beyond that dune, is it even worth the time and effort to reach it?

Who cares?

Do you?

It only means something if there is something. The rest is running around, a headless chicken flying over the winds of a planetary nebula.

Lost like particles in the corona of the Sun.

Impossibly hot and impossibly apart.

Blinking like dots and dashes. Like snowflakes appearing on the night-blackboard of a winter night window.

Signifying nothing.

No matter what sound and what fury you might have blown into this pretty bauble.

So why not to rest your wear head?

Eyelids feel so heavy.

Perhaps is time to sleep.

Will anybody notice the difference?

Author’s Notes: this comes at the end of one of the worst days of the year. I did not feel right at all, and I hope I can recover, but at this point I see no different. I hope we will meet again here tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.