Back when I was in middle school, which used to be in this building within the courtyard of a Catholic church and a cemetery, I would fantasize about being dead. About how it would feel like to be dead.
During breaks, on the semi-basement corridor which had classrooms on the left and windows to the cemetery on the right, I would force myself to imagine the experience of death. Although I perfectly understood that once dead one should stop feeling, the curiosity and fascination was so strong and spellbinding that I could not stop day dreaming about it. The curiosity steadily developed into an intense desire of experiencing death. Right then and there. The desire wasn't for suicide, but for an instant and natural ceasing to exist. So that I could understand the fact of not being. I desperately wanted to burn all stages of my life in a second and get to experience that one minute before and whatever else was after. I wasn't curious about whether there was anything after, I was obsessed with the experience itself. This is how my obsession with experiencing nothingness started.
Later, in high school, I remember I would stare at myself in the mirror for days, imagining myself older and being yet again eager to burn the stages, finding myself to be another. Normally, people would use this technique to see themselves better, wiser, cooler or more accomplished than they are in the present. They would essentially use it as an inspirational device. I would use it just to escape the burden of being and thus simulate the experience of not being. I wasn't Peter Pan going off to live in Neverland out of fear of growing up. Nor was I, in case I need to stress, MK Alice falling into Wonderland out of a basic need to cope with ritual abuse. I was Mary, with Moon in Scorpio, going off to stop living out of a personal, deep, and intense curiosity.
Over 4 years and two point-at-myself-and-shoot cameras later, at University, my desire to use myself or others as models in my pictures stopped and, without any notice, my fascination of
shadows appeared and started to weave itself into my obsession of not being. Until recently, I was unaware of this weaving, and explained my tendency to notice and shoot shadows or desire to create and record them as my means of expressing anger at the injustice of not having proper equipment and injustice of equipment in general. I thought of myself as a dadaist in the relaxed, mainstream sense. Until recently.
In the last two years, however, I was forced on many occasions to think of the less further future, but still far enough to surpass my daily, monthly or yearly goals. To surpass my current day dreams or reveries. And I couldn't. I found myself trying hard to imagine a course that my life would be expected or need to take, imagining the path and not the end. And I couldn't. I couldn't see anything at all. As if there was nothing. And then I finally knew I had day dreamed about nothing for so long that it eventually caught up with me and managed to engulf me enough to not exist anymore in the future or for the future. To almost not exist at all, being constantly at the threshold of physical existence and mental nonexistence. I eventually became my own shadow.
As my own shadow, I am not Peter Pan, living happily ever after in Neverland. Nor am I part of the Peter Pan Generation, delaying the happily never after into Realitybitesland. I am Mary Revery, daydreaming sterilely ever after into nonexistence. And that makes me feel exactly what I longed to feel from the very beginning. Nothing. And my only reason of still existing is to prolong its experience. In an absurd hedonist way. Until the true end.
