(I'm Not Going) Anywhere

My skin felt almost naked without the smears of filth that had previously occupied it, and stung from the familiarity of cold water and soap that I had scratched my face with.
Regardless, I felt a little better. Better than I had felt in a while, anyway.

I paid for a bottle of coke and a subway roll, feeling my heart sink like a stone as the till pinged obnoxiously. I had just thrown away most of y squandered money right then. Damn it.
In any case, I took my food and drink and settled into a corner table, ignoring the offended looks the shop attendants were throwing my way. Even if I was clean myself, people never seemed to look past the ripped mud-stained jeans or the dusty hoody. When I was paying for my food, one customer even turned her face away from me and stepped back, as if my homelessness was some sort of disease. It almost made me want to punch her.

My theory was this; even when I hadn’t been living like some kind of child tramp, people always found some kind of an excuse, no matter how petty, to treat me like the fucking plague. Like my sexuality: I was gay, and therefore, an outcast. Right…
The most likely cause was that most people are insecure and hell. And making someone else look worse than you is the only logical way for you to feel better about yourself. But the thing that instils the most self-loathing in me? That if you hear that you are worthless shit enough times, you eventually start to believe it.

The thick, semi-stale bread dried my mouth, and the limp lettuce was barely even disappointing; I snapped half of the sub down in almost a minute, biting my fingers in the process, then downed several mouthfuls of the flat soft drink to avoid choking. It had been days since I’d eaten something remotely substantial – weeks since something that resembled a meal.

A little girl, skipping towards the exit with mother in tow, paused momentarily at my table, staring in wide-eyed perplexity. I smiled uncertainly, shifting backwards and away in my seat.
“Mammy, why is that man dirty?” she mewed with a soft lisp. Her mother evaded meeting my eyes as I glanced up at her, eager to hear her answer. She simply ushered her daughter away from me with desperate, fluttering movements of her hands, out the door.
Something in my chest twisted in a fucked up melancholy as the little girl turned to wave: her mother grabbed her tiny, pale hands, encasing them in hers, and pulled her away.
The mother’s eyes met mine for a sharp, brief moment as she glanced back – they were pulsing, brimming with dull, ill-considered fear.