Dear Santa, I want to believe. I want to believe that you are not just a product of my imagination, a simple projection of my own mind. We live our lives bound to what we see as projections of our minds. Visualizing objects relationally proportional to what we think their properties are. I’ve believed in you since ever. But now you are just a mediating projection of some bearded drunk guy on the streets of New York City, wearing something red, collecting money to buy more booze. I had an idea of you. Some concept of what Santa is with his sled and reindeers flying from chimney to chimney. You were a giver. One devoted his life to making children happy. Why don’t you make adults happy?

Why do we need to lose our innocence as we grow up? Why is there no place for you in the heart of an adult? As we grow up we start seeing only the flaws in each other and the world. But you, Santa, are an innocent concept. You cannot survive in a sinful mind. And now, my mind is sinful. When I think of your red suit, and the color red, the apple that appears in my mind is filthy. No matter how shiny and tasty it looks; it has been devoured by worms. I am losing my innocence and I am losing my childhood. I am losing my faith.

People associate ‘faith’ with God but I used to have faith in you, Santa. I used to have faith in your red costume and white beard because you reminded me of my grandfather. Your belly made me think of my mother’s tiramisu and warm milk that used to put me to sleep. I can’t sleep anymore. As I grow older, my imagination grows with me. I don’t see the world with its blue sky, its projected blue oceans, yellow sun and flying birds anymore. I used to live in my projection of the world, where every color was so distinct from each other and so clearly pictured an emotion in my head; all of which were positive. My head was filled with ideas that would have taken me to the moon. And now, everything I see is so intrinsically colored that I cannot distinguish the visual anymore. Everything is mixing and losing radiance. It is all gray.

Blue used to be the wing of a butterfly that I saw in my dream and now it is just cold water. Cold water I need in the mornings to remind me that I am a robot programmed to finish all I need to finish within the 24 hours that are bound to the concept of time, described by the watch on my wrist. Green makes me think of the food I force myself to eat in order to keep my body from transforming into a creature of oil and uncontrolled desire.

Red does not represent the rose I used to give to my mother on her birthday. It rather makes me think of anger, power and sex. Red is so dense and heavy like the feeling that everything in the world is about sex, besides sex. Sex is about power. Because it is only when you own someone sexually that you don't have to worry about losing them. Red is the color my eyes turn when I can't get my point across, when even words cease to exist. Red is the color of blood that is spilled out of the veins of people who suffer.

Things are happening, associations in my mind are changing, and so is the world I live in. Because the world is my projection of it. And I don’t know what is real anymore. Has anything ever been real? It all feels like a deception. My mind is deceiving me. The more I think, I realize, the more I lose the sense of reality. As if I am the only thing that is real and the rest is just what I live through in my mind. And what if I am also a projection of some bigger mind?

Dear Santa, I want to believe in the reality of myself, my mind and everything that my mind can imagine. Because the mind is too powerful to stay bound to the limits that science and technology and tactile reality surrounds it with. The mind is too fluid to be limited by the visual projections of what we call 'reality'. I am real, as real as the memory of myself who believed in Santa. But she is not real anymore. So what about Santa?