I'm back. Back in the real world, back in school, back in LA. This seems like it should be such a small thing, coming back from a few week's vacation. Instead I feel like I've been forced to leave the place where I belong. I'm not alone in this. My friends all tell me of their post-Burning Man depression, that initial shock of returning to the real world, to jobs and responsibility and television news.

Sitting here at a desk, in front of a computer, I feel like I imagined the whole trip, that this city in the middle of a dry lakebed in Nevada never existed, and I half doubt that I ever saw a burning temple of plywood lace, a whale that breached five hundred miles from the ocean, a hundred strange automobiles that spit fire and hurled flames, a city that grew from nothing to something and back again in a week's time.

I'm still having dreams about the desert, dreams where I am riding my bicycle across an endless expanse, lights twinkling on the horizon, city lights like no other. I dream that I am under a sky full of stars so close I can touch them. I reach up and the Milky Way is like mist through my fingers, the night breeze cool and dry against my skin. In my dreams, I am home.