When you go to another town, city or country, you can experience many different things- see new sights; better weather, or just different if that's what you're after; taste different foods and meet different people.
The one thing which is quite inescapable is what rattles around in your own brain. Travel can be fantastic for opening new parts of your mind or distracting you for a while, but the demons of doubt and self loathing lurk close behind, like a shadow growing longer in the day and waiting to consume all at night fall.
The black dog is not stopped at quarantine or customs, nor is it required its own passport, but travels freely right along side you, perhaps imperceptibly at first. Then one day the delirium of a new holiday wears off, and jet lag creeps up, weighing you to the spot until you roll over in the middle of the night and it's staring back at you. Big black eyes which sear into your core, making it impossible to deny that all you had been trying to pretend you weren't is still true.
For me, it's right beside me in the mirror most of all, saying that you can't hide what you are- no make up, change of clothes or different surroundings will hide what a freak you are. I am disgusted with you, and everyone else is too.
Every time you manage to forget about it, When y walk down the street, there are so many eyes- laughing, mocking, taunting eyes, which remind you of this- you are a fucking weirdo freak who will never be acceptable. Other people are just a reminder of what you're not- they may be beautiful, comfortable, happy, laughing, with fulfilling lives. You walk past them, empty, as though performing a role, although badly, and they mock your failure at trying to be one of them.
Away from work, home and it's usual distractions, the banale routine of normality, it is only more apparent, the hollowness of it all. The shame of loneliness you daren't confess for fear of further mocking, and the paralysing ironic inability to talk to people and remedy the situation.
And so I drift, alone, through country after country searching for a soul I will likely never have.
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