being shown the sun after living in the dark, and how going back into darkness is a little death

how do i say everything that i am meaning to say? it's not going to come out right. the only thing that comes out right these days is vomit.

i am back in the States and in my bed and refusing to get out because i cannot face the nightmare in front of me. this city makes me weep. this city rips off small bleeding chunks of my soul and tosses them away casually over her shoulder. i am no more than tissue paper to her, translucent and disintegrating. Los Angeles, in her stiletto heels and sun-drenched hair, has rounded on me with a look of condescension for daring to come back. i do not care. i am equally revulsed. i know about the dirt behind her ears and how under all that makeup she's nothing, she's rotting flesh.

i have spent the last three weeks adoring europe and i have spent the last three weeks throwing up. i am not sure how to explain this except to say that i want all of europe, i want all of it and i want to swallow it in one go, but i am afraid. los angeles disgusts me and i do not want to touch anything, so it is here i do not eat.

i ate baguettes and cheese and apples in Paris and walked eight hours a day and was startlingly, achingly happy. i remembered how i come alive in old cities; i remembered the sudden surge of my heart which had been dormant so long.

already that is fading. i have sat here now for 40 minutes trying to figure out how to describe it, but it's gone. i have been here one night and already Los Angeles has me by the throat. i awake parched and sucked dry as only the desert can do. my brain has returned to mush, my heart diminished, my soul having locked himself away in his small snail shell and sealed up the door. i return with regret to one of the walking dead. i survive here, but just barely. i yearn to live somewhere that will make me thrive, but words like yearn and desire and thrive and wish and possibility are too abstract, eroded into disuse by the hot dry winds that fuel insanity and a certain resigned rootedness. LA is a trap, a leech. you come and are dazzled by the lights and the sun and without knowing it she's bitten you, clamped on to the back of your calf, thinning your blood and slowly diminishing you as she grows in power and gets fat on your strength. you can wrest and pull and shake her off but there's still her teeth attached to your muscle, still the blood-thinning poison leaking into your veins. you are weakened. there is nothing to do but wait it out, to die here, wishing vaguely for that life you could've had that seems more shimmering dream now than reality.

something about this city makes you forget that the rest of the world exists and is different. you begin to imagine that everywhere there are sun-bleached blondes with too much makeup, ugg boots and mini skirts worn together, flippant casual ignorance, bright lights and ads everywhere, where nothing is not designed to not sell you something, palm trees advertising a utopia that is more bleached dirty concrete than sun and sand. maybe i have been here too long. maybe my blood is too thick for california.

maybe it is time to go.