It's like a camera hooked on to the brain.

You’re in Eastern Europe. The smell of post-high school procrastination with a hint of heartcore breakup fresh in your nostrils as you start to get reacquainted with life outside a monogamous monastery. Alcohol is on the menu, every weekend, until you crawl in your bed and sleep the week off. You’re not doing much during the week, and you’re not really there anyway. Life swims past you as the only hours you count as being alive start and end with the weekend. Something is missing, something the poor grey shades of your immediate environment can’t project, you figure, life’s different someplace else.
So you move to Western Europe.

The smell of fresh papers, ex-pat communities, German language courses, heavy drugs, heavier money take the wheel. You start dealing just to pay for X-Box games, which take up Monday to Thursday sprints. You start doing blow and speed just to finish getting all the achievements by the time another Friday evening hits you in the face and you wake up staring at a sleeping chick getting groped by Pedobear in your bed. You stop sleeping altogether, and look more and more like a vampire to anyone not on a binge.
Weekends still look the same, and it isn’t enough. You smirk when your ex comes to visit, and you get stoned together and sleep together and you almost fall for the together joke when she gets back with the other douchebag she’s trading you off for. Tough shit, move on.
So you move on. You run away farther than her reach, you jump continents and land nosefirst into Pasadena, California. The smell of wide highways, Koreatown, Venice Beach and Neon Parties invade you like an alien infestation.
You spend your week learning cameras, narratives, how to think in thumbnail pictures and your weekend metaphorically headbutting every kind of substance abuse legislation in the area.
More cocaine, LAX, forgetting what snow looks like, nostalgic over what snow looks like, you move back to square one. Eastern Europe.
You go back to not sleeping, and as the days fuse together, you lose track of calendar. After a while, all weekends look the same. Eastern Europe, Western Europe, California, everyone drinks the same drinks, watches the same movies, everyone fucks the same. Spring catches you off-guard as you wake up from your downward spiral and decide to break the dawn without wrecking yourself.
You sit down, pull out a notebook and sigh. The bar glows like through a white noise dream dream, as you pull out a pen and start writing:
“You’re in Eastern Europe…”