"I don't want to go home, where I'm just an ordinary human being"

(quote: RA the Rugged Man, video: Bishop Lamont "Every Day")


A great city is a work of art. An intricate symbol for what it means to be alive loosely fastened to place and time, wrought in concrete and iron and flesh and music. Clinging to the particulate in the smoke of its cigarettes, the reek of its exhaust, the priceless steam leeching from the streets. The feedback of instruments and the sound glasses make clinking together. Great cities loom with their idea, wrenched from the biographies of their most wild-eyed children. They dare those inside of them, and the dared leave them different in the way that we are ever changing to become ourselves. They carry their justification in every line and heart palpitation and criminal act and throwing up of hands. Great cities are not of their country, but of themselves and even when they lay eviscerate and mottled in the hung-over sun each can be differentiated from the next simply by the way their people sigh. Detroit I love you, and I hate you, and you always show me new faces. Always tip my hand, tell me what to write, frame even your banality in the skeleton of what you were, the skin of what you'll be. I no longer make value judgments about your future . . .I simply watch.

I went back to where I'm from for the holidays. This great industrial empire. It is weeping, and it is tired, and it is angry. But it still laughs when I get it drunk. Of the smattering of homecomings, this was singularly the most ecstatic and most difficult. Home crushed me and inflated me, changed my shape for the next six months while I resettle to old forms. My father and I screamed at each other in our haunting suburban basement. And then I told him things I should have said at 17 when it was much easier to simply sneak out and back in. And for perhaps the first time in my life I did not lie to him. I spent many hours downtown with another family and vaguely felt as though I were living on the reputation of a person that I murdered by leaving him out in the cold. Kindled a glowing friendship with someone I was only a smiling acquaintance with. Drank until breakfast cafes opened and we all walked down the middle of the street in the snowy grey. Squeezed onto a couch with warm, skinny legs six inches away and watched the sun come up on the alley and the church just outside the window; all the house asleep save me. For a few minutes I watched someone sleep and it was as if no time has ever passed or ever can . . .like I've always been on that couch and always will be. Attended a party in an apartment that I vomited in exactly three years before when someone else entirely lived there. Shared the city with someone I've come to know by the internet almost exclusively. Had a final night in an old hang-out, one of those departures that rings in your ears and the moment you're alone you simply put your forehead to steering wheel and try to make every detail part of the permanent record. There is a reason why laughing and crying sound the same. I've left so many times, and in so many ways . . .there seems to be no room in my heart for actually being anywhere.