11/30/25: vegas

I recently remembered the trip I took to Las Vegas with my parents in the summer after 5th grade. We drove there— I’ve always had an affinity for long road trips. I was at a strange point in my life. I didn’t have a single friend at the time, nobody to talk to or spend time with, nobody at all. That provided me with a lot of time to think about things. I had spent nearly every single day leading up to that trip sitting alone in my room. 

It was early afternoon by the time we entered the city, immediately being met with tons of lights and colors, I was extremely overwhelmed yet mesmerized. We dropped my mom off because she was there to meet up with her friends, me and my dad would be staying in a house a few miles from her hotel. My dad and I spent the rest of that day just driving around, looking at everything. I remember the girls that stood out on the sidewalks in bikinis, the fountains, the billboards, huge buildings, music, casinos…

Randomly, my dad mentioned to time that Las Vegas was structured in a funny way. He described it as a box. Outside of the “box” is nothing but the barren Nevada desert. He told me that the city just “ends” and eventually showed me a satellite view so I could see it for myself. 

The next day, we did a bunch of fun tourist-y activities, and the whole time, all I could think about was how just outside this bubble of lights and noise, there’s just nothing for miles and miles. Seeing everything from that perspective made everything feel surreal, like a dream sequence. There was one night where my dad accidentally started a fire in the house because he didn’t realize there were things in the oven before he turned it on, so we stayed in a hotel that night while the owner of the house handled things with the fire department. Even the hotel didn’t feel real, it felt like I was in the backrooms or something. We got back early the next day and they had already installed a brand new oven, leaving the old one in the backyard by the pool. 

On our last day there, my mom came over with her friends and we sat around in the kitchen talking, the only thing I remember from the conversation was the louder of the two friends telling me not to dye my hair black because her daughter did and it faded to an ugly color.

On the drive back home, we talked about how exhausted we were, and told stories about all the crazy things we saw— my mom told us that she watched a guy do a line of cocaine off the dashboard of his car at one point. Once it had gotten dark and my mom was asleep in the front seat, I felt a wave of sadness come over me. It felt like I was waking up from the dream, leaving the fantasy behind to go back to my regular life. I didn’t fully come back to reality for a few weeks, I felt like I was living in a movie.

The world is one big Vegas box.