[Audience Choose Your Own Adventure] The Recluse Part I

Like the sky, I have nothing but water in my veins. This is the place I choose to hide.

In heavy rain, where warm mist rises from the ground and you seem enclosed in a bubble, you could almost forget that anything exists beyond, couldn't you? But then the rain clears, the sun shines, and the high clouds in blue re-envision the broadness of your world.

This is the place where it never clears. The leaves press close. The mist rises constantly. The air is damp, metallic, loamy. Inside of this tiny world, I have my own smaller world: a hut where I hide and engage myself in reading, musicmaking, meditative thought. Perhaps the happiest moments of my day are those that I spend enshrouded in blankets, basking in my own warmth, halfway between dreams and wakefulness.

I do not blame anyone for the state of the world. The earth is a sphere of limited range. Even at the top of a skyscraper, we all continue to live in a state of nature: the natural progression of the world resulting from the reality of physics and so on.

"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." This overplayed quote of Nietszche's is meant to describe corruption through contact. But I like to imagine that it means that what you affect affects you. If I kill a cow, so the cow does to me the act of being killed by me. Everything touches everything. A single ant is part of a colony, a single colony is part of an environment. People are the same. Every butterfly, dinosaur, leaf, volcano, that ever existed or will exist is tied with us. Nature was always going to make something this way -- it's natural clockwork. And now we are here.

But I am here. Can you blame me?

I've never tried to find my way out. I've learned how to gather food. Since I'm only one person, there's no risk of eating all the fruit or nuts. There are two seasons: vaguely warm mist and rain, and cold mist and rain. You want to think of them as "summer" and "winter." You would think that way.

I chronicle my dreams. I don't have paper, so I chronicle them in my mind by going back over them every day. The list is long. Actually, I spend hours doing this. I may eventually think of almost nothing else, and that's where I want to be. That's even more here.

Sometimes, I hope I never wake up.

Today, I force myself to rise and enter the cool forest surrounding me so that I can seek out my breakfast. I have no idea what time it is, except that it is day, perhaps early afternoon. The sun is obscured by mist and vegetation. I make my way to where the coconuts grow. But as I crane back to seek a ready coconut on the tree, something catches my eye.

A glimpse of bright red, an artificial kind of red -- dancing in and out of the mist above. It is moving away from me.

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One: Ignore it.
Two: Chase it.

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Dear Readers,

In this CYOA, I am trying something I mentioned before: readers collectively choosing what will happen. Please comment with the option you'd like to choose, and I will continue the story. You can also feel free to make suggestions of any kind.

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