Vires acquirit eundo

I have changed. I am no longer the same girl I was when I first arrived here. There was hope, this stupid hope in my mind when came to the city. Small town country girl in the big city lights ready to take on anything. I could be anything. So much ambition and now look.
This city has destroyed me. I am not who I want to be. I have so long tried too hard. Consciously planning. Always planning always hoping for a better reality that somewhere along the lines I lost focus on this true reality and now live in the future. I live in my head. I am so far gone.
I loved the start. Dipping a toe down the rabbit hole and feeling the thrill and rush of something dangerous and new but now I am too far deep. Far too deep to even know where I entered. Every turn a dead end, no lights to see. The damp ground, the shallow air, the dirt under my nails and the filth lining my clothes. I can't even recognise myself. I see someone else, someone I don't know yet know so well. The tunnels just kept going and going I had to stop.
I am now a leaf. I fall. I am falling. Once apart of the growing majestic tree, spawning from a small seed. Feeding from the love of the sun and the tender care of the earth. Revitalised with every passing day until I detached from the tree and feel. Like the leaf I am. Thin, weak and lifeless. Falling and swaying where ever the wind will take me. No longer caring if I make it if I win but only caring about surviving.
I am surviving. There are few seconds just before I wake up where I think I am back home. Back where there are sounds of crickets welcoming the new day. The sound of ma's cooking on the stove. Her fluttering voice singing an old song. The smell if hope, ambition and potential. The freshness of youth. But then I listen closer and it's the sound of the boom gate closing and train tooting. The bustle of traffic in morning gridlock. The sound of a plane about to land and the wail of sirens from a ambulance. Sometimes I feel I can only hear the pollution. The air is thick.
The potential is gone. Instead it is this. This tar like rubber, fabricated by my thirst for the thrill. I am used, I am broken, I am lost.
This city has lured me in, tickled my senses and taken me whole. Like the erogenous whore she is.