Tombstone of Hope

The city knew it was dying.

Los Angeles did not collapse suddenly—it bled out slowly, aware of every poisoned drop leaving its veins. It remembered when the rot first took hold, when the ballot boxes were tampered with and elections became theater, staged performances to keep the same party enthroned forever. The will of the people was gagged, replaced with a script written in back rooms where deals were struck not for citizens but for cartels.

The city remembered. And it wept.

Each skyscraper was a rib in its decaying chest, hollow and echoing with the ghosts of promises never kept. The freeways moaned like veins collapsing, clogged with rust and smoke. From every corner came the laughter of corrupt mayors and hollow governors, men and women who sold California’s soul for campaign cash, who knelt before drug lords while turning their backs on the starving, the homeless, the lost.

And so the city began to eat itself. Fires bloomed in its hollow stomach, chewing through neighborhoods that once pulsed with life. Sidewalks cracked like dry skin. Murals faded into the ash, their bright colors mocked by graffiti written in despair. The palm trees stood like sentinels at a funeral, charred silhouettes against the poisoned horizon.

Los Angeles knew it was no longer a dream but a warning—an empire of false light, self-aware enough to see its death yet powerless to stop it. Its glow was the glow of a corpse on fire, its breath the wheezing smoke of neglect. A city once called the future now served as the tombstone of hope, whispering to all who dared look upon it:

This is what happens when truth is buried, when power serves itself, when the people are silenced.