The Recluse

Steam rises from the blue coffee cup, the liquid inside a caramel-colored blend of sugar and cream that matches the tone of the hand holding the handle.

He looks out the back window over the sink as Gatsby, his mid-sized furry companion, waits patiently for him to put bits of meat in his bowl and freshen up his water for the first time of the day. As always, he’s aware of the dog’s piercing stare as his own hazel eyes stare off at the tree line split by a slightly worn down footpath.

It’s probably been about half-a-decade since he sold all of his things — save his guitars and sentimental memorabilia from his life before — and moved away from the place he called home. The last string connecting him there had been his parents, and, once fate cut that thread, that sense of “home” disappeared from his life completely.

He has no home. He’s just squatting anywhere he goes now.

For now, his current shelter is a mobile home/camper in northeastern Wisconsin, just a couple miles south of the UP. He’d been there before when he was much younger, and its peaceful isolation had always stuck with him.

Since the first night, he’ll open the windows (but never step outside) when he hears the wolves howling off somewhere in the woods. The noise seems to both reverberate and collapse back into the darkness of the gravel roadway that cuts into the thick and expansive cluster of trees just a stone’s throw away from his door.

After months of the same routine, Gatsby doesn’t even growl or hide from the sounds anymore. Instead, he tries his best to mimic the tones, like a timid singer trying to harmonize on stage.

He’s never known what he finds so soothing about that particular soundtrack. Wolves aren’t pleasant and fluffy little animals — especially not when they’re hungry. But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe it’s nice to know that even things we see as monstrous and capable of great destruction still contain some little speck of beauty they add to the world as well.

Not enough to counteract what they’ve done, no. But enough to appreciate for a moment.

After he’s satisfied looking out the window, he relents and throws a few slices of ham into Gatsby’s dish — separating each slice into smaller, bite-sized pieces that drop down with a wet thud one at a time. The hardwood floor creaks underneath his feet as he crosses through the little door frame sans door into the living room area.

The pitter-patter of little foot pads on the floor follow him.

In a little while, Gatsby and he will jump in the truck and take their morning drive around the area listening to an old, ‘90s album from his youth. Yesterday was Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness, which for some reason always made him feel the most nostalgic.

When they return home, Gatsby will go off to lie down in his bed near the TV while he logs on to start his remote editing work for the day. Remote work is the only work he really accepts anymore. It’s not that he hates people or anything like that. He just doesn’t want to talk about what they want to talk about.

“Hey, did you see that the president …”

“Can you believe that they’re …”

“Those motherfuckers are going to …”

He just can’t stomach more disappointment in humanity. So, he doesn’t swallow down news that’s going to make him more bitter.

He’s aware everything is hell. He accepts it.

But there’s nothing he can do about it — except try to find a way to make hell livable.

After his usual shift of making sure other people’s words come across as being more intelligent than the writer is perhaps truly capable of, he logs off and blanks everything from his mind again.

On days when he’s not too tired and the weather permits, he and Gatbsy walk west from the doorstep of the mobile home and stand out on the little dock on the other side of the main road that runs perpendicular to the one leading to the woods. It’s about the equivalent of a city block away from their shelter.

Even in the winter, they’ll see fishermen clad in coats and layers of clothing sitting out there hoping for a bite. But by sunset, the time he and Gatsby routinely show up, they’ll have long since given up for the day.

There’s something about sunsets that you can’t fully appreciate in the city. That sounds snobby, but it’s not intended to be. There’s just too much stimuli hurled out from all directions when you’re part of a larger crowd.

You forget to look up long enough to notice the different colors and subtle shades that gloss over the sky as the sun calls it a day. There’s not enough time to watch how nature takes its time to do things.

We have to respond to that text or answer that call just a second too soon for us to realize that appreciating the true beauty of the world takes patience.

We interrupt the epiphany for the trivial monotony of the impulses we’ve been trained to have.

But he doesn’t. Not anymore.

Now, Gatsby’s the only thing that interrupts his thoughts most of the time with subtle pushes for attention and affection.

Originally, he hadn’t planned on ever bringing a dog or any living thing along with him on his current odyssey.

However, about a week before he left, an older friend stopped by his house with an ultimatum.

“You’re taking the goddamn dog with you or you’re checking in every day,” she said, bluntly as always. “I’m not having you killing yourself on my conscience, and you’re not going to do it if something depends on you.”

He’d known her long enough to know this wasn’t an argument he would win, so he chose the dog.

It took a little while, but he’s glad he did.

Because she was right.

At first, he had eventually planned on ending his life when he finally gave up on finding a new home. He had taken it as an absolute certainty.

Though, sadness wasn’t the main driver of it.

Not even hopelessness can really wear that crown.

The closest he’s ever come to explaining it simply is, “It’s hard to continue to live as something that’s already fulfilled its purpose in the story.”

However, he doesn’t really believe in killing another living thing because of his own emotional state. And with Gatsby in his world — wholly dependent on him — he has a temporary purpose to still wake up tomorrow for at least a number of years.

But even after deciding suicide was off the table, he didn’t expect to be a recluse for this long.

Sure, he had been a recluse for shorter periods of time throughout his life, and he’s long accepted that he has to put forth the effort to overcome his naturally reclusive nature.

However, that effort waned over time.

Because he thought someone would have come looking by now. Maybe it was the size of his ego, but he had always imagined that he was someone too good to let go forever.

Then, years of silence taught him the truth: Those thoughts were just an illusion created by a fragile being.

He’s sure that snippets of films from his childhood of the lovable recluse being welcomed into society after a lifetime excluded played a big role in the image in his mind. Time and time again, the outcast becomes part of the fold. Someone finds a way to love the rebel without a cause.

In essence, someone came looking, and they were found again.

While that is perhaps how it should be, reality doesn’t play out that way.

The fact is, there’s a reason the old, folk-wisdom phrase, “Out of sight, out of mind” is so popular. Whether it’s intentional or not — and in fairness, most likely not — we forget each other the further we get apart.

Not by distance, necessarily, but by time.

Think about the last time you talked to your closest friend from your 20s.

Now, consider if you had a moment somewhere in the time when you desperately wanted to say something to them. Search for that moment that may exist when you found yourself looking for their name in your contacts with a whole message about how you were sorry so much time has gone by without talking.

Then, remember the moment you deleted all of that and just said nothing.

Why did you do that?

Why — in that moment where you could have stopped things from fading away — did you choose to let go?

If you ever find that answer, be sure to tell him somehow. Because through sporadic sleepless nights and mornings considering the question and all possible causes, he hasn’t found it yet.

Neither why he’s made the decision, nor why loved ones have done the same concerning him.

Regardless, the silence of the years created a block somewhere in his heart for those things. He can still feel that surge of warmth through his veins. That fire that emanates from his heart when he thinks of certain people. But it goes nowhere before the entropy of the rest of his emotions absorb them again.

It’s just another feeling recycled without impact.

At first, he believed it’d all go away. He’d wake up again. Life would flood back into his body. His deep desire for love would drive him out of the darkness back into the world, if nothing else.

That’s what he assumed.

But, then none of it did.

Instead, inertia crept in and put its things in the closets. It took up its own side of the bed.

Weeks become months. Months became years.

He supposes using your voice has to be like exercising; you stop doing it long enough, it’s harder to start again. And, at this point, his has atrophied beyond being more than just a little inconvenient to strengthen again.

There’s no one but Gatsby who ever hears it now anyways. Hell, the black type in the rare text message he sends to any friends are more his voice now than the mix of highs and lows that rumble out of his mouth.

He doesn’t know yet how to feel about that other than noting it as a fact.

Before it gets too dark, he gets his little dog back inside to the safety of four walls and a locked door. The wolves of the woods don’t come ever close, but he won’t take the chance.

Sometimes at night, looking around the mobile home, he’ll see flashes of when he and friends came here when they were 20. About 10 college kids stuffed into a one-bedroom mobile home, drinking more than sleeping, or anything else.

To think back on those times now hits him differently than it ever did before.

It wasn’t too long ago that those moments felt just like yesterday. But somewhere in the past few years, “yesterday” became “a lifetime ago”. Instead of feeling in tune with that version of himself lost in the folly of youth, he looks back like a father or relative reminiscing about a child.

Because he was just a kid then.

And he is most definitely not a kid anymore now.

As he gets ready for bed and scrolls to find some Youtube horror story to fall asleep to like he does every night, he hears it. Instinctively, he walks over and opens the windows.

Tonight, he won’t need the horror after all.

He slips back into bed as Gatsby jumps up and stands at the edge, ears perked up.

For a moment, the dog looks back at him, as if asking for permission. He nods, and the little wolf joins in with the rest of the pack.

Turning over and closing his eyes — while wrapping the blanket around his body so that only his face is exposed — he lets out his own pathetic howl before letting himself fall into the peace of his friends singing him to sleep.

And for a moment before sleep takes him, it feels like home.