You're getting too old for the Akira soundtrack. The drums, the stops, the skits, the gamelan. Yet when you look into the crater of the city from the apartment nook, you imagine that the crevices hold just as many secrets. I loved this city once, came as a 21-year-old with more hunger than I had even for New York, because this was it, this was home, this was a crater on the rise. I'd met too many good people in its claws, and I'd punched, willed my way to belong here. Yet I leave. I leave because I'm getting too old for Akira, and one should never feel that way. Instead of gamelan drums paired to dystopian anime, soon it'll be the Smiths and Joy Division. Life should always be a struggle, because where else is the fun, if not in these flashing lights, in the decayed?
I'll be back.