In the Beginning...

Once upon a time, as all good stories begin, lived a little old hermit in a cottage built for three. 

This cottage he had built with his own hands, labored for hours laying white stone brick after white stone brick.  Whereas most sane people would chose to live in the same vicinity as, or at least within driving distance, from people, he had chosen this location on top of the cliff specifically for the view of the expansive ocean and the absolute solitary atmosphere.  In other words, there were no people within a 20 mile radius save for the few visitors to the beach not blocked off by the barbed wire that fenced in his private section of the beach.  Moss grew on the stone brick and on the boulders that rested near the house.  The trees were weather beaten and bent pointing east from the harsh ocean wind.  The tufts of grass that poked up through the cracks in the rock bed were tough and strong. 

The cottage itself was a beautiful wonder, or at least it had been once upon a time, long ago. The rough white brick had long since turned mossy and greenish brown from the moisture from the humidity and ocean spray and the wood porch was rotting and old.  Newer boards had replaced those deemed completely unsafe but the porch was still unsafe to walk on.  There were ivy and other such vines crawling up the sides of the cottage and the thatched roof had been repaired many times using tin sheeting, and the tin was now rusted and thinning in parts.  The once white picket fence was now no more than a line of rotted stubs of fencing.  The house was, in a word, trashed.  Yet here the old man remained, as if it was a stark representation of his own life.

The old hermit had long since ceased to hear the crashing of the waves on the rocks far below.  It wasn’t that he was deaf, or that his hearing was failing.  No no no, he ceased to hear the waves because he refused to hear anything except the roar of the silence from the lack of company and the guilt, bitterness, loneliness, and sorrow he refused to let go. 

There is a wide range of emotions that a man goes through in his life time, in fact I am fairly sure that every man and woman experiences every type of emotion that can be felt, and even some that aren’t identified.  Happiness and sorrow, rage and lust, love and hate, unadulterated raw emotion that threatens to overwhelm and confuse and exhilarate. If a man, or woman, claims to only have felt a small range of emotions, you should instinctively know that said man or woman is indeed lying, and lying quite horribly.

How this relates to the old man previously mentioned is quite obvious, as points go.  For the old man had indeed felt the range of emotions provided to human kind and to even some intelligent animal life, though the proof is hardly credible or backed by proper science.  While the emotions in our beginning are mostly of the depressing and miserable sort, it is possible that throughout the journey we here will take, and quite coincidentally the old man we are viewing through the goggles of the omniscient reader, we will encounter emotions of a wide variety, some easily identifiable, and others not quite as easily.  In fact, you may find that as the omniscient reader, that you are no more knowledgeable about the encounters than the old man, and yet more so knowledgeable, my dear readers, because you have something he doesn’t have.

Me. The author.

The man’s name is not crucial to the continuation of the story, and we can’t very well use “The Hermit” for the duration of the story, we will identify the old man as Norman for clarifications sake, and for our sanities sake.  In all actuality, names are quite important to the identity of a person, because for some, names are the identity of the individual, and if you know their true name, you then have control and power over them.  And yes, dear readers, you know Norman’s true name.  And however you look at it, you have no control over Norman, so he is indeed quite safe from the power you think you may have over him.

Norman’s name actually describes him fairly well, in that he is indeed from “The North.”  The north of what, no one has ever been quite sure of, but he is indeed a Northerner.  The fact that he now dwells in The South has nothing to do with his name, but it could potentially be part of why he is so confused in his identity. 

On this particular day, Norman decided to take a stroll down the path that wove along the cliff to his private beach.  I mention this, not because of the unusuality of the situation, but to simply point out that he had left his house to begin what would be the adventure of a life time, even though he wasn’t aware of it at the time.  In his mind, he was simply taking a private stroll along his private beach, alone in his morbid and depressing thoughts. 

If you have ever been to the beach, then you know the absolute joy one feels when he has the beach completely to himself.  You also know the absolute horror and aggravation to find the beach horrifically crowded to the point of feeling like a pot of lobsters cooking for some grandiose feast in the honor of a gluttonous king.  And happily for Norman, though he would never call the feeling happiness for he no longer felt any emotion but negative, the beach was completely devoid of any life form of any kind, which includes and is not limited to humanoid and crustacean.

The white sands were beautiful and stretched out in both directions in a perfect symmetry of beauty.  The ocean was blue and perfect, with prefect waves and not a cloud was in sight, which he never took notice of because he never looked up from his path.  His hands were jammed into his tan pea coat pockets, his plaid scarf was wrapped tightly around his neck, and his jeans were warn and tattered from wear and use.  On his head sat an old, black newsboy hat that had obviously seen better days.  His grey mustache and beard was as unkempt as the hair that hung from beneath the hat in scraggly locks.  A scowl seemed permanently etched onto his weather beaten and browned face. 

He was what we would call a grouchy, crotchety, bad-tempered, grumpy, irritable, crusty, cantankerous, and crabby old man.  He was the type of men small children would cry at seeing, slightly older children would run in terror, and even older children would play tricks on.  That is, if people could even find his cottage.  Being 20 miles away from the nearest human being’s abode let along near a town had its benefits, in his mind.

And on this day, the day he chose to take the walk along the perfect beach on the perfect day, he was walking to check on his borders.  The signs that were posted at both ends needed maintenance to keep the message ‘Keep Out’ clear to any and all that happened to venture upon said sign. Most people who happened to see the sign would study the craftsmanship curiously.  The sign was an odd mixture of ancient and present, though mostly ancient. He had carefully carved into a large slab of wood the words ‘Keep Out’, painted the carved out trenches that formed the letters, and had secured the board to a metal stake that was jammed deep into the sand and attached to the barbed wire fence that was strung along his property line.  If the unlucky adventurers happened about around low tide, they would notice that the fence extended an extra ten feet into the water.  Yes, Norman was nothing if not thorough in his isolation, if not a bit obsessive.

This day was unusual in many ways, most of which were unknown to Norman, and he was soon to find out exactly how unusual this day would become. 

The first unusual sighting was of a bench situated on the grassy part above the sandy beach.  It was an ordinary wood bench, weathered and worn, yet Norman had never noticed it before.  In his mind, the bench had never been there before, so someone had to have put the bench there by design.  And he would be right in assuming this, because he would know best as he trolled the beach daily to keep out trespassers. He had memorized what the landscape surrounding his property looked like.  He knew when a tree fell, when a sand hill was taller or shorter, when the tides were out of sync.  He knew because he obsessed.  He obsessed because he wanted isolation.  And he wanted isolation because of reasons that you as the reader are not yet privy to.  And to be honest, even if he would never be honest with himself, not even Norman fully understood his need to be completely isolated.  But this was all soon to change.

He stared at that bench.  And not just at the bench, no.  Because on this bench sat the second unusual sighting of the day: a couple.  Now, to you and me, there is nothing unusual about a couple sitting on a bench, be them heterosexual or homosexual in nature.  But to Norman, who had only known of heterosexual relationships between two people, was shocked and horrified to find that not only was there a couple sitting on the bench, but that the couple was not a man and a woman, but indeed a man and a man.  And he was horrified at the close proximity of the pair, so close they were that it was completely obvious that they were together, and by together, Norman understood that it was in the way that he and his wife had been together, that his mother and father were together. 

They were, in fact, a couple very much in love.  The two men were enjoying a relaxing day at the beach and had no awareness of the little old crotchety hermit named Norman.  They were there to simply enjoy each other’s company and the fact that it was their one year anniversary.  What Norman didn’t know, and what you are soon to be told, was that these two young men had met long ago in college, their freshman year.  Neither had suspected that their friendship would develop into what it was on the day they sat on that innocent bench, but they were immensely glad that they had come to that point.  Even through the hell their respected families put them through, the shunning from their friends, the forced removal from the Christian school they were attending, they were thankful for each other and for their love.  But Norman had no way of knowing all of this.  The only thing this old man saw was what he had always believed as an abomination sitting on a strange, unknown bench, committing the horrible act of simply being there.

Now, this story is not about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality.  Far from it, in fact.  I am only telling you all of this to explain why Norman abruptly turned away from his barbed wire fence of isolation.  Because turn around he did, in a huff that would put a three year old to shame, and he started to tramp back towards his house, all the while muttering about how a brick wall was becoming quite necessary to be built.  He did so with the intent of phoning the police to complain about a disturbance of the peace.  But he only made it three steps before halting in his tracks because of what he faced.

Norman, as was explained earlier, trolled this beach daily.  Which meant that he knew the beach like a mother knows the face of her child, or a zombie knows the desire for brains.  He knew this beach because it was his.  So to say he was both surprised and shocked at the third unusual sighting, this time of a freestanding door standing inhibited on his beach, would be a horrible understatement.  He moved completely past the planet of Surprise, past the meteor belt of Shock, and landed on the planet of Flabbergasted with its orbiting moon of Speechless.

A door?  A most perplexing sight indeed, to see a freestanding door in the middle of a pristine beach.  It was a very basic, ordinary door that was white in color.  It had a very basic, ordinary brass knob and a very basic, ordinary deadbolt lock.  And the longer Norman stared at the very basic, ordinary door, the more a memory tapped at his brain, pleading to be let out.  But no amount of pleading and begging would submit the mind of Norman the Hermit, no sir.  Because this door was a very basic, ordinary door, he knew he had seen the door countless times before.  Because it was so very basic and ordinary, it was quite common in many different structures.

As any sane humanoid creature with the capacity to think would do, he walked around the door carefully, examining every nook and cranny he could of that door without actually making contact with the blasted thing.  He briefly toyed with the idea that he was hallucinating, but a quick tap at the frame squelched that idea instantly.  The door was real.  Tangible.  Palpable.  Perceptible.  Touchable.  In other words, not a hallucination. 

As the popular saying goes, curiosity killed the cat.  Now, while Norman the Hermit was not a cat, he was in fact a very curious man at heart.  This door intrigued him, it called to him, it practically begged him to open the door to see where it would lead.  Logic told him the door would lead to nowhere different, that what he would find on the other side would be the exact same if he simply walked around the door and stood on the other side.  The irrational side of his brain, which by no coincidence happens to be the more dominate side in most humans, told him that this door was a special door.  To which he promptly agreed with because the door had not been there before, and had appeared out of nowhere by some means completely unknown to him.  Even as he approached the door, logic and irrationality waged a small war with each other, fighting for dominance in the great dilemma of whether or not to open the door.

And, as the statistics would show in almost every human, irrationality won the battle and his hand turned that very basic, ordinary brass knob.  And irrationality pushed that very basic, ordinary white door.  And the basic, ordinary white door swung open and he stepped in.

And that’s when things stopped being basic, ordinary and rational and took a turn for the bizarre and irrational.


Next Chapter >>