Gobi Desert
Harrow International Hong Kong, Sama Jayachandran, Fiction: Group 3
A
broken scene. Devoid of hope and meaning. A tasteless mosaic, blank, constantly
bombarded by burning sands or freezing snow. An ever changing canvas, ready at
any moment to destroy the imprints of the bottoms of human shoes, ready to erase
the idea of life.
A harsh wind rips the sand off the top of the haunting dunes, blasting red dust across the
unearthly and desolate landscape. The wind howls as the man travels. His tired feet trudge
sluggishly across the seared sands of the Gobi Desert. Alongside him, a large black dog walks. It is
not a regular dog though. It doesn’t follow its master because it has any affection for him--it’s tied
to him. Part of him.
As the man walks through the desert, he looks cautiously at the dog. Remembering how it had
terrified him. How he had tried everything to get away from it. How when ever he looked over his
shoulder, it was always still there.
Part of him.
He is not afraid of it now, though. For the black demon that traced his every step had
eventually broken him. Now, he is resigned to its presence. He accepts the monster for what it is.
Because, the truth that he’s in too much in denial to realise, is that the dog is him.
He doesn’t know what he is doing in the middle of a desert. He doesn’t know how he had got
there, either. All he knows is his purpose.
He had come here to die.
The unflinchingly brutal and desolate landscape of the desert soothed him somehow. He felt
that he should die in a place that reminded of all that went on in his mind.
Lonely, empty, hopeless. He shared many things in common with the desert. He wished it
wasn’t true, but he couldn’t shake the reality that it was.
The desert suits him just fine, because he knows that it is somewhere he can be excused for
his hopeless sadness. He can’t die in the city, where he lived--no, there is no reason for him to
want to die there.
Here, though, any sane person will inevitably consider death as a way out. The fact is,
whether in the city, or in the desert or anywhere else, he sees nooses everywhere. His agony was
at a point when these strange visions of death were so out of control, that it was almost funny
what reminded him that he needed to die: seeing a tall building, seeing a bridge, a crowded
highway. He couldn’t walk out in the streets without being blasted with a sensory overload
because his brain just kept reminding him of his pain.
In the desert, however, death is all around him. Vultures ominously circled remnants of
animals that couldn’t cope with the desert. Here, he would be insane if he didn’t think about death.
All of the pain, all of the hate and anger and rage that brought him here, that represented the
dog. He is just a shallow husk of a man.
It had followed him from day one. From the day he was born, his feelings of emptiness were
embodied through the existence of a gigantic hound. He can pretend that it isn’t there, he can
deny it to himself until he dies, but, it will always be there. Unsympathetic to his pleas and cries.
Now he knows, it will follow him until his bitter end.
