Nothing on this planet excluding the experience itself could have prepared me for the eldritch horror that is a big city. Small town minds weren't meant to see these truths. They can't even be seen. It's a hidden truth only talked about by those who have experienced it firsthand, as if it were as common as sunlight, and you begin to wilt in the godless shadows. They don't mean anything by it, it's history, it's natural, it's "how the world works," but as the stone slabs fall on your castle of sand it's apparent that you were never privy to their secret world; you weren't born right. You have to wonder if they trained, if their bodies are mangled and contorted into these shapes, if humans aren't naturally round, but secretly jagged in ways you've been sanded down. "Going big," "going commercial," they gate themselves off and say that they're not so different from you, but in the depths of their mind are dreams, deep dreams of freedom and expression. My brain is as smooth and flat as the plains I was born in; I dream of existence. At the very core of what motivates our continued existence they have surpassed me. Some days I struggle to eat in the meaningless shadow, but far from the old trees that rule small towns, there are plants growing in the sun. And that thing is Sunlight, the light of choice, of information, of knowledge, of community and connection. It's something they have. The shadows draw longer, and you wonder if it's becoming night because you've never felt the sun to know when it was day. That unknowable cosmology strikes horror into my heart. That feeling of potentially never knowing the sun they feel.
For me especially, I think about the past, and how half of me had felt the sun once, and how that sunlight lead that half to death. Do I even want to feel their sunlight? Do I want to know it exists? Or is it too late, and I have to find something in the sun to enjoy now that I've rediscovered it lest I be burned to the ground.