Chapter 27: Desert.

2015.

Eleven weeks and one day in the desert were enough to find the unattachable pieces of myself. The commonly present winds in Borrego Springs were the only persistent companion and main source of hatred, those nagging winds, inconstantly poking and pushing —spoiling an otherwise acceptable time. I screamed at them, taunting the gods of an atheist.

They might have turned me crazy —yet I could clearly see that I had no intention whatsoever to go back from where I came from. Forward, many paths unravelled.

The lonely nights in the desert were strangely alienating: they didn't only bring a grueling sentiment of lacking an identity, but sometimes I saw shadows and had acoustic hallucinations —the whirling winds replying to my anger. I rationalized it as something stemming from hypnagogia and avoided giving it further importance.

In the end, the shadows weren't good advisors anyway, suggesting nothing but what the dark corners of my subconsciousness had insisted in torturing me with. They were desultory voices to which I had to give a meaning —a bleak one, as per routine.

That pattern, like every pattern, would be broken.

In this case, the trigger of the breakage was a strange kind of human contact. Angry at the prospects of the day, I wandered through the desert, carrying mostly water.

A chant was coming from a human, not from the wind. It captivated my attention. It was coming from a hole in the ground. The landscape had dozens of holes in the ground, probably the effect of the infrequent rain in pockets of calcite.

I kept looking, hole after hole, for the turning waves from chant. Its harmonics reverberated strangely, making it harder to detect the source. Yet I wouldn't desist.

And sure enough, I reached the right hole: an individual from the species of the Californian-enterpreneur-turned-hippie stayed there, meditating in a precise lotto position. My applied psychology had failed many times before, but this time it was hinting me a great chance of being someone that had the rarities of a previously successful startup guy. Like someone that had indulged in his eccentricities after he had been given —maybe even earned— heaps of social respect because of being succesful in his ventures, respected enough not to be considered simply a lunatic.

He looked almost like the man on the hole in Monty Python's Life of Brian. However, he hadn't taken a vow of silence:

“You've heard my calling.” —flatly. He had an accent. Middle eastern, maybe.

My presence had been well received —whatever I was interrupting could easily be restarted.

“I guess I did hear you... wailing?” —maybe howling.

“I'm Baariq.” —still sat, in his lotto position.

“I'm Alice.” —gave a wave with my right hand.

“Welcome to paradise, Alice.”