r/BurningMan (Circle One: Limbo)

Part 2/10: Where Love Goes to Die (...and Reincarnate?)

The gates of r/BurningMan looked exactly as I had imagined.

“Virgil,” I shouted over the howling wind, “I can’t see anything!”

“That’s the point,” he called back, then immediately tripped over what appeared to be a neon-pink bicycle shaped like a—wait, is that what I think it is?

A man emerged from the dust storm wearing nothing but a tutu and safety goggles. “Welcome home, beautiful souls!” he screamed, arms wide. “I’m Moonbeam, and this”—he gestured to the bike—“is my art installation, Phallic Freedom. It represents the patriarchal oppression of—”

“We’re just passing through,” Virgil interrupted, dragging me around the bike.

…exactly as I had imagined. And believe me, I’d imagined it plenty.

Years earlier, in the wreckage of a ruthless heartbreak, my newly ex-boyfriend—seemingly without a heart, or any awareness of my relationship to the month of August, or to him—booked a one-way ticket to the Playa and left me with nothing but my phone in a foreign country and a stomach that refused to hold down food. I spent seven straight days toggling between his last-active status on WhatsApp (were we still in the chat together? or had he blocked me there, too?) and the festival livestream (what if I spotted him in the crowd? what if he spotted me spotting him?).

In my therapist’s office, hollow and nauseous, I asked: “Do you think he’s having fun? How can I feel this miserable while he’s just… at Burning Man? Probably trying to fuck a stranger in an orgy room?”

She laughed. “Alexa, half my clients go to Burning Man. And if I could only tell you how miserable they are—you wouldn’t think twice about it. Is it pretty, artsy, wild? Sure. But is it paradise? Not unless your idea of paradise involves dust rashes and polyamory gone wrong.”

Now, trudging through the actual hellscape with Virgil, her words felt prophetic. Here was a desert where hundreds of thousands of people gathered to build colossal art, wear costumes, and stare into the eyes of strangers while their inner children begged for meaning at the temple of expression—the same way Homer, Socrates, and Virgil had sought meaning before them—all while sand filled every open (and closed) orifice of their bodies. Burning Man is a place that suspends time, suspends reality, and offers seekers—wealthy ones, mostly—a glimpse of a brighter tomorrow, and the collective fantasy that together they could build it. Spiritually, it embodied something like… a divine limbo.

And now, here I was, scrolling standing inside it.

Whenever I’d pictured the Playa, I saw vast white sands, easy to walk on, with seas of smiling faces. Like the first day of sleepaway camp, only this time you were surrounded by beautiful people—influencers flaunting sponsored outfits, tech bros dressed like orchestra-conductor-meets-night-club-DJs, girls who could pass as Britney Spears’s distant cousins, Angelina Jolie if you squinted hard enough, or Christina Aguilera from the Dirty music video (bless). I pictured them laughing, exuberant, their chemically induced ecstasy glowing across their faces, everyone falling in love, and everyone forgetting about the outside world—specifically, the girlfriends they’d just left behind in Europe.

“Virgil, what are we doing at r/BurningMan?”

“You’ll see,” he said, leaning forward into the wind that was close to swallowing us whole. There wasn’t a sliver of sun in sight—let alone the glowing faces of America’s happiest campers. Though, somewhere in the distance, I was hearing laughter.

I had always imagined myself as distinctly separate from a world like this. Not better, not worse—just not there. In a universe of Moonbeams, I was a Rachel. I have an exciting interior world filled with imagination and appreciation for all things eccentric, but my exterior—how I present, how I relate—has, on more than one occasion, been described as… basic. A labeling that had become an aching sore spot, especially after losing the man I thought was the love of my life because I wasn’t “what he’d imagined”—and a girl named Bethany Boleyn, not to be confused with Anne (but not that dissimilar, reader), was. What he wanted was spectacle after spectacle of femininity. Clothes “interesting enough,” legs “skinny enough,” and faces that could morph on command.

Even now, trudging through this dust storm, I remembered the comparisons. The low feelings. The way he made Burning Man an encore of our failed trip—a trip that was supposed to be a fairytale (turned anything but)—and painted it across social media as if our bond’s death hadn’t even… fazed him.

Why would Virgil bring me here?

Is Burning Man truly the waiting room of hell? A biblical plague? Maybe. After all, plenty of the least enlightened, most egoic people you’ve ever known have been photographed roaming the roads together—Elon Musk, Aubrey Marcus, all of his sister-wives, the shaman hawking microdosing kits on Instagram, and the girl who once tried to recruit me into Nexium—so yes, this place must be a devilscape. A superficial escapade only the soulless might choose, where wannabe acid-head artists gathered to swim in the desires of their labia-massaging dreams (which is a real course you can take with strangers there). Fuck a stranger, call it enlightenment.

I knew I was right. Virgil was here to prove it.

“Get out of your head,” Virgil said.

“What do you mean? You aren’t even talking to me.”

“I can still hear you,” he replied.

“Oh, great—you can hear my thoughts now, huh?”

“Not just yours,” he said solemnly.

Fine, I thought. I’d better shut up.

But I couldn’t stop my thoughts: …why was I here? What had I done? I had only just destroyed my belief in a higher power. Was the sadness over losing five subscribers really worth all this? I was honestly just kidding when I said that. I’d always believed in God, and gone out of my way to avoid shallow party pursuits like this one… and I’m not usually so sensitive to rejection, but those subscribers—I guess—oh, I don’t know. It just hurt! And scared me, a little. Like if I try to write about anything other than finding a husband, will I lose everyone’s interest…? So… why… am I… here?

“I’ll explain everything soon,” Virgil yelled back. “We’re almost there.”

“Where?”

“To the place of limbo.”

“What do you mean? I thought we were already in it.”

Virgil didn’t answer. He approached a massive, withering tent—unzipped it, and behind the first zip, there was another. And another. And another.

I followed close behind until the storm had vanished and only one zip remained. When it opened, something different appeared: a mirrored window—kind of like the ones you see in a police station (Law and Order SVU style).

“Virgil, what is th—” My hand rose to cover my mouth.

“That’s… me.”

“Yes,” Virgil said. “That’s you. Do you remember what you were doing?”

“I was watching my—”

On the other side of the glass, another, younger version of me lay in bed, a phone an inch from my face—watching, no, devouring the livestream of Burning Man—crying, strung out, exhausted.

“Worshipping an idol god,” Virgil said. “A picture of emptiness. Of longing. A longing for a love that will never come. And a limbo… of your own choosing.”

I pressed my hand to the glass. It was cold.

Virgil tilted his head. “You know why it still hurts to see it?”

“How did you know it still hurts?”

“I can feel you,” he replied.

Oh, great. First my thoughts, now my feelings.

“It’s because you’ve been keeping it cold. When grief is locked away, doubted, downplayed, avoided, or suppressed, it freezes. And what freezes doesn’t move. Grief has to move.”

I stared at him, my mascara bleeding into the desert air.

“Here’s the principle,” he said. “Whatever is in the vessel”—gesturing at my heart—“you must keep it warm.”

“What does that even mean, Virgil?”

“You start to view your grief with affection—every kind of grief you carry. You care about it the way you once cared about him. You write about it, cry about it, dance about it; you tell other people about it. Warmth keeps grief soft enough to flow. Cold makes your heart harden like stone.”

“Heart hardening?”

“Yeah. You could call it that,” he replied. “Heart hardening happens when you’re closed off to your feelings. When you’re numb and unaware of how you feel—so you start being arrogant instead—judging—calling people at Burning Man unenlightened, egotistic—viewing yourself as superior to them, even if you don’t directly say it. Or—comparing a woman whose acted in the same way you have to Anne Boleyn.”

“Oh, come on... it’s not like I meant it. Also—I never even said it out loud?? It’s your fault for listening to my thoughts!”

“It’s your hell for having them.”

I looked back at the girl in the bed. She was frozen stiff around the phone. I imagined sliding it out of her hand into mine, as if I could take over for her. My job wasn’t to smash it or throw it away. My job was to just be there with her. To remind her that she’d get through it eventually.

“So… what’s the punishment?” I asked, looking around, a shiver of fear running down my spine.

“For the people stuck in limbo, it’s not so bad,” Virgil assured. “God punished them by staying away—by allowing them to remain wrapped in a love destined to fail. It’s a place of longing. For the artists who worship art over a higher power, the intellectuals who worship reason over faith, the hopeless romantics who worship—”

“Okayyyy, I get it, I get it…”

“It isn’t just you,” Virgil said.

He tapped the mirror, and it flickered into a 007-style control screen—buttons, gadgets, lights blinking. A keyboard of dial tones chirped as he typed, pulling up present-day limbos: solitary rooms, tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people—scrolling on their phones, pacing in their rooms, worshipping… something, or someone, that could not, would not, love them in return.

“As humans, we are wired to worship,” Virgil said.

“You mean more than just Beyoncé?”

He glared at me. “And we will,” he continued. “All of us. We find something—or someone—to worship. People who deny the presence of God—or the Universe—whatever you want to call a higher power—they don’t get banished into hell for eternity. Their punishment is simply that they don’t get respite from experiencing the full depths of their own emptiness. The way you did. The way you sometimes still do. And the way these people are, right now.”

“I see.”

---

On our way out, we stopped at the r/BurningManTemple. I expected some kind of confessional theater; but what I witnessed instead was a low weather system of sound—humming, paper rustling, the unglamorous hydraulics of group-weeping. A woman I did not know pressed a photo to the wood and then, without looking at me, set her palm on my shoulder the way you do to a stranger at a funeral. We were grieving together.

Dust clung to every face, every wrist, every tear line. For this strange moment in time, every Moonbeam in here—every Rachel—every everyone—all shared one skin. The part of me worshipping my past, the regressive part of me—that girl in the mirror—wanted me to time-travel back to the weekend before he left and beg for him to change his mind; but here, now, with Virgil by my side, and this woman by my other—I had a new option. A higher power—which was maybe just this collective whole of strangers standing together with their burdens—asking me to use my imagination to design a path forward. To lean into a new identity—one that wasn’t tied to him, or us, or a failed trip to Europe.

I turned to Virgil.

“They should really supply makeup wipes in hell,” I said, blubbering through my own snotty spit.

“I’ll put in a word with the higher ups.”

“Yeah, speaking of which—where are they? I’d also like a word.”

“We need to keep going.”

“Well… as they say… I am ‘ready when you are’.”

And to the next circle we went: LUST r/NSFW.

To be continued…