alone.

We hadn’t really planned on this situation being long term.

He figured he would just run away for a month or two and crawl back to the city with his tail tucked between his legs.

But it had been three years now.

He had decided that it was time to leave when he was listening to NPR one morning. The rich had begun their race to space.

“Space Tourism” the voice on the other end of the radio said, and that was it.

He decided then and there that it was time to go. He walked out of his workplace without a word. He made his way home and grabbed anything he could sell for supplies.

Laptop.

Television.

Gaming system.

Printer/scanner.

DVDs.

CDs.

Speakers.

He penned a note for his roommates, apologizing for leaving so abruptly, before he left with a backpack full of clothes and toiletries to meet up with a man he had contacted via online classifieds about purchasing an old VW Bus.

Life in the city had worn on him quickly.

He had tried to understand people and the way they worked.

He thought he had come to the high rises and bustle to get away, but only ended up trapping himself.

He worked. But deep down he felt that his passion was writing.

Something he never thought would be the end to his own means.

He thought about it often. Life as a writer.

Truly inspired, one who could paint masterpieces with keystrokes.

His job, his thoughts, his life would always catch up with these daydreams

and soil them.

But now, he had all the time in the world to write.

To actually write, pencil to paper, and create.

He would lie in the back of his VW Bus and stare at the sky.

His ideas and thoughts would shape the clouds in front of his very eyes.

He would take long walks and imagine scenes playing out in front of him, in the empty forest.

As he tended his nightly fire, he would stare into the dark, beyond the reach of the flames and his stories would become reality. Twisting shadows and rising smoke, mixed to create vivid, visual serenades of the mind.

And then he would write it all down on his pad of paper. In great detail, explaining the things he saw through his mind’s eye.

This collection that had grown from the toils of his fingers and thoughts had become, in what was his most humble opinion, the best things he had ever written.

Of course, there was no one to edit these workings.

But perhaps, that’s what he enjoyed most.

They were his raw feelings, scrawled, scribbled religiously on all this thin yellow paper, without anyone to tell them how to arrange or display them to make other people happy.

Tears would come to his eyes, even when he wrote of things that were not sad.

He was purging a well that had been building deep inside of him for some time.

These words made him feel.

They made him real.

They made him who he was.