New Me in Same Old Las Vegas

Thanksgiving, cat sitting, dry eyes, and potential marriage.

The moment I crossed the threshold into Nevada my eyeballs began to burn. It doesn’t matter how many cans of Liquid Death water I chug, how fresh my contact lenses are, or how depressed I am in this place. I simply cannot cry. My tears dried up.

Was it always like this? Did the liquid in my eyeballs always evaporate instantly in the high desert? All the other times I’ve been to Vegas, I was drunk and high. So maybe they withered and stung but I couldn’t feel it. Like I couldn’t feel the pangs of hunger screaming from the lining of my acidic stomach during a days long bender. I couldn’t feel the jagged, dirty fingernails of the man I was with as they cut me from within when we hooked up, right before I blacked out. Nor my own ravaged cuticles curling into paper moons, disintegrating into dust.

But now I feel it all. I feel my desperately parched skin sucking up the La Mer samples I slather on relentlessly, only for it to absorb without a trace. Dusty. I feel dusty. How do people live her…