*** I haven't written prose for years but I found a scrap of paper in my desk drawer with the opening two sentences on and I felt really inspired ***

...And all that happened was that it imminently dawned upon me that you can't find solace in a single person, nor can you seek completion in something as incomplete as yourself. The metallic bite of this statement lingered in my mouth as I lay, defeated.

That had been the whole point of this adventure; discovery of self, self-sufficiency etc etc etc until I begin to sound like an upper-class art student who is "just so damn oppressed by this capitalist haven". But, with only twenty dollars left in my battered jeans, I realised that I'd spent a stupid amount of money pretending I was Jack Kerouac, forgetting in my excitement that my life was not a novel.

I laughed to recall the lonely motel nights, surfing the web for cool things to do in whatever city I'd happened to end up in, then sighing and watching a straight-to-DVD movie, trying to find poetic meaning in the static of the cable channel. Trying to avoid my own company as the walls stared back, blank with apathy and the sunlight reluctantly crept in, worrying that it had disturbed the perfect "woe-is-me" cliché that I had created.

For alas, no police stations did I sit tempestuously in, cold coffee and panda eyes. No buses did I flirt my way onto for free. I learned a lot about independence... I'm grateful to myself for that, but I also learned that as much as you may want to, you cannot crawl back inside yourself to escape from the ghosts that hide in the canvas metropolis of your soul. I discovered that I wasn't trying to find myself at all, I was trying to lose myself amongst neon glares and catcalls and kamikaze bars... I almost succeeded.

However. When I least expected it, feeling the epitome of smug liberation, the essence of who I am would creep back to me across sticky nightclub floors. The least gentle reminder of the jigsaw puzzle pieces I had strewn from bar to flat to cab to park. The "burnt-coffee" smell of realisation that I was actually just as dependent, flawed and insecure as everybody else who pretended they were ok being alone. But that's fine.