When there’s nothing left to burn, you must set yourself on fire...

As I flicked my cigarette and the wind blew my hair in my face for the thousandth time, I looked up. The same stars that I’m searching for in the ashtray LA sky, I could see clearly from Christmas-card perfect Amherst. I smile because it’s home.

I’m sitting at my favorite hookah bar, on my favorite busy, car-infested boulevard, listening to a conversation that I take and leave as my ears will allow. My thoughts are everywhere and nowhere at once, and when the waiter asks me if I’d like more tea I absentmindedly nod. He winks and coyly asks me if I have enough sugar.

I respond, I never do. For the tea.

There’s Middle Eastern music in the background and it reminds me of that boy that I once loved. We’d spent many nights there, on that hectic, garishly, almost obscenely busy boulevard that catered to late nights and breaking curfews. My eyes lost focus again, but I didn’t let myself get lost by the ashes that had collected on my cigarette and in my head.

I was moving to Texas at the end of this week. Though I should probably rephrase that and say that my mom and sister are moving to Texas and I was moving to limbo. Leave the college and come back home, leave the home and move to nowhere, is basically the summary of my nomadic wanderings for the winter. I wished for a second I had decided to hibernate in my dorm room until everything had settled, and then I repeated to myself what has become my life’s philosophy: Things happen and nothing is certain.

But death, I suppose.

I needed a moment to fix the medusa’s head that my hair has become, because a storm had descended on San Fernando Valley. My valley. It was saying goodbye in the way a scorned lover would, howling at my infidelity at having another valley to seek comfort in, and another home in which to toss and turn on restless nights.

I walk to the bathroom and in front of the mirror run my hands through my hair. I miss my long, untamed curls, but I decided to straighten my hair so it’s my own fault. My lips aren’t chapped for the first time in months, and I resist the urge to lick them because the wind will make me pay for that decision too. My eyes are dams, the only sign that there is something rushing forward, pressing outward, wanting release. I’ve changed.

I walk back to the carpet we’re sitting on, appreciating and loving the fact that its nearly 2 in the morning and there are people out. Just out. The waiter walks by, grins and asks me if he can change my coals. For a second I really want to quote Buddha’s Fire Sermon, for absolutely no reason. It’d be lost on this moment. Maybe later, maybe with someone else.

Instead I say, I’m leaving. I am. It’s time.

Sleep. Miles and miles of sleep, that’s all I’m thinking about. And the stars. I’m looking at them. Wherever I am, there they are, where I am, there are stars.

They’re where you are, too. It comforts me, and I grab my coat and walk back on to that boulevard.