Be kind to me California.

Be kind to me California, I closed the door on my way out.

All my hopes and dreams rest gently at your feet now.

I look forward, past even the present and peer into the rose garden of my future.

Because….

“If I look back I am lost”, this rings in my head and its true. Well, mostly.

Because the place I come from is unforgiving, it’s dry and cracks away beneath feet.

The sun refuses to warm there, it burns. Burns away all hopes and dreams.

The soil refuses to grow there, it aches. Violently drying up any branches of happiness or leaves of change.

New Mexico Land of enchantment, where my family never leaves.

New Mexico land of entrapment, the family I never see.

Because it hurts to go home, no reason to witness a small town where the streets all look the same, littered with the same dead end thoughts and overripe regret.

My classmates are the new wave now, the most recent generation caught in this cycle, waiting patiently in line to be dried up by poverty and laid out like waste in the desert heat.

Seeing people you grew up with side by side years down the line shouldn't be difficult or revolting, but it is, in this place where a cloud of hopelessness has lingered for more years than I can count, a mist breathed in silently by all of those around.

My home, to me, tried to take everything from me. But sometimes I do think, maybe I, being me, was the only one who was suffocating, maybe it isn’t as hopeless as my mind makes it seem.

I hope so.

Regardless I left, closed the door and locked it.

Its been years now since I threw away that key.

( Dedicated to anyone who was swallowed up by the “Land of enchantment”, New Mexico, Thank you for reading. Check out other pieces I’ve wrote if you are new!)