August 21, 2008
THE HERMIT
| PAUL ABBAMONDI |
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Yours is a voyage to nowhere. A wasteland of sorts, where mica, epiphanies, and swirling dust-clouds are all the friends you’ll ever get in such rimlands. Experience is nearby, yes, but never in your face. If you want practical knowledge, if you want clenched throats and slowly spoken words, you must go and look for it. Move, put on your shoes, clean up that face, check your pod’s status: get out there.
This is the Hermit card, and you are him and her. Solitude is your shirt, discretion is your pants, and you do not have a need for shoes. The Hermit is withdrawn, is yearning. You will sit a lot, in a cave.
In there, loneliness abides, quiet moments abide, and time never tires. Your nails will grow with each pfft of wisdom that unclumps in your mind with every sun-fall, and if you had a voice you might shout out all the answers of the universe; but you have no voice, not here, not there, not where the rocks and dust and sizzling sky sit still and statuesque.
Your purpose is to think.
Do not frown.
This is not the end.
A bit of warning, fair as I am and I give this to all that flip such a card: do not try to eat your own flesh, least not beneath a waning moon. The madness of a secluded life will get to you, get in under you like an itch, and shortly you’ll find yourself ready to scratch. Do not. Do not itch. It will drive you deeper into a hole, and then you can never move on.
For a hermit—the Hermit—is not forever.
There will come a time to remove yourself from isolation, and the changes will bloom. The knowledge you’ve been whispering to yourself and rock-brothers, the whole of it, all the crams and cranks and counterclaims, it’ll come pouring out of you and into the world like some great big flood. Famine will end, war will subside, moments will hang—and you, you will find yourself in good company, alone still, deeply alone and ugly, but in a place that swings between light and dark, knowing and not knowing everything.
Paul Abbamondi reads and writes speculative fiction compulsively. His short stories have appeared in Shimmer, Aberrant Dreams, and Apex Digest, among other fine publications. In his spare time, he draws a comic strip about the mundane happenings of his life and loves looking at LOLcats. You can send him emails at pdabbamondi@gmail.com. He likes emails.
Depressed gamer is depressed « Grinding Down said,
June 22, 2010 at 10:13 am
[…] In high school, I handled it with an outburst of creativity, drawing furiously or scribbling in my notebooks ideas that would never come to fruition (like that one about a school of magical centaurs), but getting them down on paper nonetheless. I almost over-created, in some sense, staying locked away in my bedroom and just letting it all out. My small circle of friends quickly dubbed me “a hermit,” further leading to more depression sinking it, and I later turned the tables on them (though they most certainly have no awareness of this) by writing and selling a little short story about a hermit. […]