Loneliness · fiction
Alone in a big city
A 2040 story about a young Latin American man in Dubai, among glass towers and unanswered messages, and the desert that teaches him to be with himself.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
In Dubai, in the summer of 2040, people only walk outdoors after the sun goes down. During the day, the whole city lives inside cooled glass boxes, linked by tunnels and walkways, like a luxury anthill.
The young man was twenty-seven and worked in one of those boxes, on the fifty-eighth floor. He had come from Colombia with a two-year contract to program port logistics systems. He earned well. He sent money to his mother. He had an apartment with a sea view and a rooftop pool he never went into.
And he hadn't had a conversation with anyone in three weeks.
It's no exaggeration. He talked, of course, with colleagues, about work. He talked with the apartment's assistants, which turned on the lights, ordered food, reminded him of his sister's birthday. But talking for real, with someone who asked how he was and wanted to hear the answer, that hadn't happened in three weeks. He had counted.
On his phone, his messages to friends back home sat with two little ticks, read, and unanswered. Everyone was busy. Their lives had moved on too.
One Friday, his day off, he did something he couldn't explain. He rented a car and drove out of the city, into the desert, late in the afternoon. He drove until the road ended. He got out. He walked on the still-warm sand until he could see no light at all, neither from buildings nor from cars.
He sat on a dune. And he stayed.
At first, the silence was unbearable. He reached for his phone by reflex, no signal. He thought about going back. But he stayed.
After a while, the stars came out. Not some: all of them. He had never seen so many. Not even as a child, at his grandmother's house, in the mountains.
And then came the vision.
He saw a caravan crossing that same desert, a thousand years earlier. Men and camels in a line, guided by the stars. He saw that they too were far from home. That they too slept under the sky with no one to talk to but their own thoughts. And he saw that they weren't alone. They were with the stars, which were the map, and with themselves, who were the compass.
He saw himself as a boy, in his mother's kitchen, telling her about his day nonstop, and his mother listening while she stirred the pot. He saw that he had spent his life talking outward, for someone to hear, and had never learned to hear his own voice inside.
On the dune, under the stars, he realized he wasn't without company. He was out of the habit of being company for himself.
He drove back to the city before dawn. On Saturday, he did two things. He called his mother, not by message, by voice, and talked for an hour about nothing. And he went down to his building's lobby, where there was a notice board he had never read. There was a notice from a group of people from several countries who met on Sunday nights to cook together and talk about their homelands.
He went. He brought arepas. No one knew what they were. Everyone ate.
The desert stayed out there, enormous, quiet. He went back to it many times. Not to flee people. To learn to reach them whole.
Bairo says he spent six months without leaving the house, in front of a computer, and that what he built afterward came out of that retreat. Read: The frequency of silence.
The way forward
Being on your own and being lonely aren't the same; learning to keep yourself company is the beginning of being well with others. Swap one message for a voice call this week. And look, near you, for a place where strangers meet to do something together.