Knoxville, Je Te Deteste

I don't know what to say or what to think.
I have been travelling a lot because it's summer again, and when it's summer I go places, even though I didn't get to go to England again like I dreamed about so many times in my sleep over the school year. I went to Virginia three times and I fell in love with it. I came back to Knoxville two nights ago and since then I have resumed my old habit of hating myself.

Knoxville, I hate you. Je te deteste. That's French. I learned it at school.
School, je te deteste aussi.

But mostly, it's Knoxville that I cannot stand. I hate this place, with every fiber of my being. It sucks me dry. It waters me down until I'm soggy and sorry and useless. It hard-boils me until the liquid of my hopes, the juice of my dreams, has gelatinized into an impossible mass. It swells my skull like yolk swells in an egg shell, and I trash in the boiling water which surrounds me.

Actually, in all reality, the water is really more lukewarm than anything else. Knoxville is lukewarm. Infantastic, unremarkable, uninteresting, uncultured, uneducated, unreliable, unlovable. Mediocre. Knoxvegas. I writhe in it like a worm combating bad soil. It does not compute with my system. More accurately, I do not compute with its. We make each other ill.

Knoxville is the south's bumhole.

The people, apart from the few very good friends I've gathered, simply suck. They simply are either rotten fools, or angry bitches, or stupid beyond compare, or they believe that they are sent from God above to improve upon the world.
What's worse, they make me feel as though I have to prove myself as worth something.
In Virginia, in Blacksburg, I was just myself, and that was all there was to it. They could take me or leave me.
In Knoxville, I must mold. I must be squashed. I must slide around until I fit the requirements. If I fail to do so, there's simply no hope for me. I MUST be squashed.

I HATE THIS PLACE. I MUST GET OUT. It brings out the worst in me. It makes me sick within myself. The moment I force myself to sleep in my bed, where I kick and toss and turn and irreversibly tangle myself in the sheets, to the moment I rise and slump into existence, to the moment I realize that it's another day in southern suburbia (and aren't the flies lovely?), a small fragment of my hope dies.

This is no longer a game where I look on fearfully for my aspirations. This has become the real thing. My future has become endangered. Knoxville's complete lack of options, of choices, of possibility... it frightens me. I am utterly stranded within myself, and I have no hope for opportunity, no hope to escape my sure and unavoidable future which extends as a monotonous existence beneath the pressure and cracking bland concrete that is Knoxville society.

I BEG of you, DO NOT move here. Don't be fooled by its offers of comfort and hospitality. Oh, it's a comfortable life, all right. So comfortable that it won't allow you to get up and stand on your feet. As once mentioned, Knoxville is a couch, a couch of the soul-eating variety, which slowly devours your posterior, and then eventually your dreams.