The Drought in New Mexico

    I arrived here... what? 5 weeks ago already? This is above 7000 feet high, meaning 2000 meters. The lands around Santa Fe are arid. There is this huge rocky canyon northwest from here that I went visit with my mate Max and I swear you can feel the last molecules of water evaporating off the river, off your breath. Off the no-river: it's dry. The vegetation forms patches in the sand, a sand I don't believe anything can root in. Animals are rattlesnakes, black bears, coyotes... I never get to see a coyote alive. I saw many death by the road when I drove down to El Paso and I came back all thirsty.

    The first week I got kind of sick. The altitude, they say. I went mad with maths and physics and didn't really sleep. I drank a lot. The second week I didn't drink that much, so my skin got flaky. I would scratch my hand and leave white traces on the table. Then things got worst. One morning my knuckles broke up bleeding as tiny, stretched red flowers. It didn't hurt much, though. I got myself a moisturizing cream I use often, but those flowers ran round my fingers and colonized my palms: I can see them bleeding right underneath my skin, itching like hell I'd love to rip them off sometime. They erode my flesh, call my nail on a suicide scrape, and wrinkle my hands.

    Then I met all these people. Then my mind got blown up. This pack coming from all over the world to think about complex systems, whatever this is. They brought these ideas along, their discussions and their few, well chosen silences. I still try to get this thing off my hands at night, I can't help it. Also off my feet: it's itchy there as well. It's itchy as nothing I've known of before. It is, I guess, the closest I'll ever get to yielding new life, so it must hurt in a way. Also my dried lips. And these girls and guys around, so marvelous I just wish to cry out to the world that they exist, that an another Earth might just happen if we give them voice. And I turn to my hands darkened by the sun, my squeezed skin, and see Them growing and I understand. Now these new lines that weren't there before, shaping a new destiny that could not have happened otherwise. Those mates crossing my life, those new shapes for a future that is to come, all those things that--now--will happen.