Fortress of Solitude

There was something wrong with the days lately, thought Mike. What had him feeling this way? A malaise had taken hold. It was the same kind of ache that one might feel in their soul after waking up too late on a Sunday afternoon, with the sun streaming wanly through the window of a vacant house. Or the too quiet moment when the phone doesn’t ring when you expect it will. Those moments when the world feels like it has stalled out, causing one to fear it might be slowly slipping away for good.

There technically wasn’t much to complain about. Mike had his job at the diner. He even owned a small house, he was proud of that. He had a wife who was quiet and liked her privacy, loved him and they kept each other company. Mike had his four or five best friends and umpteen other, extended acquaintances that cycled through his life.

The only thing worse than death is too much routine, Mike decided.

Mike had expected to be a rock star by now. Truly. He wasn’t especially arrogant. But he’d pursued his dream seriously since he was a teenager, and well, he wasn’t a fuckin’ rock star. He worked at a diner. Granted it was a diner a stone’s throw from Graceland. Real rock stars did come and go occasionally, when there was an event in the area or some such. Mike even met and befriended a few. Even had their telephone numbers programmed into his phone. There their names were. He remembered realizing one day that none of his pals could possibly have a rolodex as nifty as his. Pretty cool. Some of his rocker friends even took an interest in Mike’s music. They took his home recordings, turning them over in their hands, admiring the personalized artwork, looking them over with genuine apparent interest. Mike watched as they stuffed them into their bags, and gave soft-spoken reassurances that their agents back in L.A. would be so lucky as to have Mike as a client.

Then they would leave. And Mike wouldn’t hear from them again for a while. He’d sit on his front porch on a quiet Sunday afternoon, after waking up late, lazily scrolling through his phone staring at the names, wondering if they would call him before he would call them. He knew they wouldn’t, but he kept making himself forget. Mike lived off hope.

The sound of Mike’s wife breathing in bed next to him was soothing. It was probably the only comforting, monotonous sound he could think of. The idle sound of plates clinking in the diner was on the other end of the scale; that reminded Mike too precisely that he wasn’t in L.A., he wasn’t in a recording studio, he wasn’t hanging out with his reassuring friends. They were away, like visitors in the outside world while Mike was stuck in his own, personal jail. To Mike, they were out there, coming and going as they pleased, walking about generally content and in sync with the world, while Mike was extricated, sitting on the bench for however long his patience would allow. Stuck there in his own fortress of solitude. That place in his mind that was beyond his physical surroundings. Sometimes, Mike wondered if he had died somewhere along the way in life and hadn’t realized it, and now he was stuck permanently in purgatory; maybe he was a wandering soul and didn’t know it?

He glanced over to his wife, still asleep, now breathing inaudibly. What about her? Was she stuck in purgatory? She seemed too content to be in a place like that. She didn’t seem to feel the malaise Mike did. She didn’t want to ever be a rock star. Mike’s love and company was good enough for her.

Maybe this is it, Mike thought. Perhaps he was sitting on the hilltop, even though it was late in the day, and the leaves were turning, and the sun was golden and tired, and the phone wasn’t ringing with L.A. on the other end, because it was giving him peace to enjoy.