N.E.R.L
Sacramento
Nobody ever really leaves.
I used to think, when I was a kid, that I could go anywhere. Be anything. That’s what you believe when you’re young enough not to know better. Every kid thinks it. It’s not even a real thought, it’s just a reflex, something your brain does before the world gets a chance to correct you.
It’s impossible now, though. I worked at U-Haul for a while, moving other people’s whole lives into trucks so they could go somewhere else. Then I’d go home and log into a game where I could actually be someone, actually go somewhere, and then log off and still be in the same room in the same city I’ve always been in.
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So I came up with this theory. It’s too dramatic to call it a curse, but too clean to call it a disease. It’s just something that’s in you, something nobody diagnoses because everyone already has it, so it just looks like normal life. You don’t feel it happening. You just wake up one day and realize you’re still here, and you were always going to still be here, and some part of you always knew that.
No one ever really escapes Sacramento. I’ve decided that much. And the ones who do, the ones who actually get out, I don’t think they beat anything. I think they just got lucky. Spared, somehow, from whatever the rest of us are stuck carrying. It wasn’t a choice they made. It was just a mercy that happened to land on them instead of me.
That’s my theory, anyway.
