As a hermit, I’m not overly fond of places like malls, freeways clogged with cars, public schools, or even the grocery store at 5:15 pm or within about 3 days of any major holiday.
I’m ok with silence in the car while I’m driving so I can process my thoughts, and certainly ok with working in silence with you if it doesn’t creep you out.
I confess to owning an invisible cloak. Yeah, I’ll own up to it. Its been mine for many many years and I still use it to escape the noise and notice of a bland public.
I never really thought about it, never really gave it much attention until I noticed myself pulling the cloak over myself (and my car) on a recent night when I was heading back to the Hermit-stead, wanting to avoid being seen. I can just slip away. Moments before eyes rest on me, I can somehow move myself out of the line of vision, skirt the gaze of the viewer and be gone. In a moment or a series of quiet steps, darkness can swallow me up and I am invisible. If I am driving my car, there is a point where I know I’ve passed into invisibility and I have vanished from your radar. I was never there.
Thinking back, I do remember doing this when I was much younger, and in a very bad part of town, at a very bad time, being pretty reckless, with certain catastrophe looming right in front of me. Realizing my mistake and bad timing and foolishness to be in so much the wrong place at the wrong time … without even knowing what I was doing, somehow I managed to vanish and escape certain evisceration.
So while I will never be an extrovert, and never dominate your conversations, pollute facebook threads with photo after photo of myself modeling new yellow high heel shoes or talk you into a stupor … I am fine with being a hermist, an observer and flying through the fringes.
A look behind the cloak though exists: www.facebook.com/hermist.
