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Diary Entry: Spring 1, Year 1
I fear I have misconstrued hermitage for salvation; when it is simply just the dwelling of a hermit. A silly daydream left over from the days of my youth when, if I required a moment’s peace, my family forced me to seek it out through hiding.
I often fantasized about what my days would look like when they were truly my own. Though now that I'm living it, I find the dream falls flat. It's not reclusiveness I'm after, but peace. And while I have a reprieve from the demands that my old life placed upon me, I have not yet escaped their ghosts.
As I look around this meagre new beginning, I'm left feeling hollow. Wondering if I have made the right choice.
Ahh well. Time to banish those pesky doubts and carry on! Perhaps there is even a new version of myself just waiting to be discovered.
I do not know what it is I'm seeking here. Merely that I need to put pen to paper for myself and myself alone. I am not a religious man, but I do hope to Yoba that I find whatever it is I'm searching for.
Diary Entry: Spring 24, Year 1
Have three weeks truly come and gone?
I find myself being carried away with the ebb and flow of life in this small town. Trying to make nice, trying to endear myself with the locals, but so far, I have but one friend to show for it.
I do not wish to discount that friendship. Leah is a treasure; one I hope to measure up to someday in worth and talent. But in true Elliott fashion, I had fabricated a version of my life here that adhered to a schedule. Which, as far as unattainable goals go, meant that by today's flower dance - a delightful custom that I will elaborate on in greater detail later - I should have met someone by now.
A fellow kindred.
I suppose that’s just the hopeless romantic in me talking. I don't need someone to sweep in and rescue me. I just crave companionship. Three weeks in this self-imposed hermitage has led me to the startling discovery that I did not want to get away from humanity… merely my kin.
Severing myself from the poison that is my family has allowed me to see it with crystal clarity. How, at one point I thought a mere change of scene would be enough. That the noble life of a hermit would draw all sorts of interesting wanderers to my door for my stories… but no one has come.
And why would they?
An entire childhood spent existing in a world so far removed from this simple rural lifestyle has left me cut off at the knees. I am not the chameleon I thought I was, able to adapt with ease. Instead, it would appear that all of the private boarding schools and clever lessons have left me othered in ways I do not know how to compensate for around real salt-of-the earth people.
I shall endeavour to cast my nets of friendship wider in the coming season and expound on the definition of hermit. Bend it until it submits and serves my needs.
Diary Entry: Summer 28, Year 1
I am an utter failure.
Every chance at friendship I get never seems to breach surface level. Even frequenting Gus's fine establishment has barely earned me a place in this town beyond whisperings of "eccentric" and "oddball."
Willy takes pity on me, as does Leah, but both are also solitary creatures by nature.
I foolishly thought to glean some secrets from them – how they handle the burden of loneliness so well – but they do not seem to be lonely. Both have found peace with their crafts and their lives, and I am left wondering once again, what is so wrong in my heart that refuses to let me settle.
Tonight, we bid farewell to summer and herald in the coming of fall. Usually, my favourite time of year, but somehow all I feel these days are melancholy. Sometimes I wish I could dive into the gem sea and swim away with the moonlight jellies. Life would be so much easier.
Perhaps I was always meant to simply be othered.
What a sad thought.
Diary Entry: Fall 5, Year 1
I felt foolish the moment Leah convinced me to pen my birthday on the town calendar. My main concern was because I thought who would bother?
I am eternally grateful that she practically bullied me into it. "Aggressive friendship" is what I believe she called it.
Despite the fact that I did not want, nor ask for anything, I was still treated to a delightful salmon dinner from Willy. Freshly caught and brought to Gus to cook. Leah ordered us a round of drinks, and even those I have felt foolish around this year, all raised a glass to my good health.
What struck me was the sincerity of it all. Not a hint of malice or mockery in any of their tones.
My family did not endeavour to get in touch. I am not surprised at their absence, only how it still manages to sting after all this time.
Diary Entry: Winter 18
I am in shambles.
I am finding it hard to force myself to leave this ramshackle cabin on the beach. I burn a fire nonstop, but the dampness in the sea air has settled deep in my bones, saturating my good spirits until I have nothing left to offer, save the cold. That same hollow inside of my chest that I felt at my first week’s arrival has not left. It only feels more cavernous now. I don't know what to do with that.
Where has the time gone? I look back to my last entry, and though a touch sad, I thought I was finally settling in here. But everyone has their own lives, and through no fault of their own, cannot offer what I yearn for.
And oh, how I feel foolish for wanting.
I cannot believe I truly thought my family had removed the need for companionship and care from me through their conditioning. I simply crave what I was never given, with such fervor now that it borders on desperate.
Winter here has me feeling so bleak, in fact, that I'm starting to long for the cold halls and sterile charity balls of my own life.
I’m starting to convince myself that maybe I was the one too hard on them.
That Yvette wasn't as icy and distant as I thought she was.
Perhaps I just harbour lofty, romanticized ideals of what I think love should look like, and am only now coming to the realization that the type of companionship I so desperately desire does not live outside the pages of a fairy tale.
Speaking of pages. My muse has all but dried up. Turned to kindling not even potent enough to light a fire. It feels like my creativity burned bright and hot and went out just as suddenly. I haven’t produced anything in months, and if I do not manifest something soon, I will have no choice but to tuck tail and return to my old life. A killing blow, as far as I'm concerned.
I just don't know what to do with all of this discontent. Perhaps I will start with attempting to unravel what it is I should be calling myself, because clearly the tranquil moniker of "hermit" does not fit like I once thought it did.
Yet another thing for that peculiar, oddball Elliott to get wrong, it would seem.
What to call myself then, sequestered away as I am? This forced isolation. This wretched confinement, this self-imposed seclusion that seems to stretch hopelessly on and on before me. The beach and the weather as white and as blinding as the blank pages I stare at day after day. Snowballs of crumpled paper piling up in my trash bin until they avalanche over the sides like a cascade of disappointment.
I will give myself the year. If I cannot find what I am looking for by the end of fall, I will not suffer through another lonely winter in this place.
Diary Entry: Spring 25, Year 2
Life goes on. Winter's hold over my heart finally thawed into spring and newly budding hope.
I am officially "old news" in town’s eyes now.
A new farmer has moved in, and I have been relegated to the shelf of oddities and curiosities.
A warning has been uttered in jest to the new farmer that she need approach me with caution, lest I break out into poetry in front of her? I am not sure the why, only that it stings.
When Leah broke the news to me, I was mortified. Had seriously considered packing up my things and saving myself the mortification of another lonely year, because apparently my reputation - though I know not what I did - now precedes me.
I will be forever grateful to Leah for talking me down off that ledge and encouraging me to meet them. Clearly, she recognized the spark long before I did.
Our initial meeting happened quite accidentally.
I had been wandering the beach, going over bits of prose that had been lodged in my head. Nothing of any real importance, as I am still very much confined by the limitations of writer's block, but sometimes it helps to just talk it out to the air and the sea and the hermit crab that hitches a ride in my pocket.
It was on one such occasion where she heard me lamenting and approached.
I have never been more smitten in my life.
Where I had steeled my heart for mockery, she brought joy. When I accidentally made a self-depreciating joke, she didn't find it funny, and when she asked what it was that I was doing and I replied, she had seemed truly interested.
By the time we parted, I was at a loss for words. Instantly wanting nothing more than to remain in her presence. I must admit, after that first encounter, I actually went home and let my mind wander down roads seldom travelled. Before our next meeting, I had produced no less than three poems and ten pages of fresh writing.
She is my muse… and I loathe to tell her in case I am looked at with the same confused sympathy as the rest of the town lends me.
Diary Entry: Fall 5, Year 2
She remembered my birthday. That in and of itself is not terribly notable, the way this town has a perchance for celebrating them. But the cake she baked? The fresh pomegranate she decorated it with? The way she makes me feel seen? Whole?
I wouldn’t trade that for all the best-selling novels in the world.
I suspect my self-imposed exile is coming to an end, as I am swiftly finding it harder and harder to spend a day apart. My writing flows easily now, my heart is full, I have found my home in a person, not a place.
Yes. I think it incredibly fitting that today, on the day of my birth, I am officially retiring the title of hermit, and hopefully bachelor altogether. This solitude never suited me anyways.
May the next lonely soul who takes up the mantle also find what they are looking for.