Soap Box Corner

The sun rises slowly over the edges of the small town, brushing gold over the fairways and bunkers of the forgotten golf course just outside the town proper. It resembles a path once frequented, now just a cluttered way through an overgrowing forest. Thomas is already there, bent over the 7th green, fingers dirty with soil. His back is a silent arc against the waking light. His breath comes slow and even. There is no rush. The world hasn’t asked anything of him yet.

Each morning begins like this. Alone. Before the first golfer, before the sound of cleats on asphalt or the slap of car doors. There’s a stillness here that doesn’t require explanation. The grass glistens with dew, and the sprinklers click off one by one like a ceremony ending. It is a silence shaped by the hush of dawn in the countryside, not absence, but something sacred and waiting.

The fairways stretch out like long exhales, winding softly between low hills and weeping trees. On the east side of the course, a small stand of cottonwoods shiver, even in the still air, and the smell of fresh cut grass mingles with the sharp trace of irrigation water. The sounds are few: a distant birdcall, the rhythmic rustle of the rake across sand, and the hum of life waking slowly, peacefully.

Thomas wipes his hands on the hem of his shirt and looks around. Nothing dramatic. Just green space and early light. But something about it feels enough, for now. Years ago, he had lived a different kind of life. Lecture halls. Conferences. People who nodded thoughtfully when he spoke. Students who saw him as something noble or at least “well read.” He was good at being articulate, at offering polished answers to the kinds of questions that haunted him in private. But answers are easy in front of an audience. They lose their shape in solitude.

Once, his days had been filled with noise, lectures, arguments, applause, a relentless tide that never allowed him to sink beneath the surface. Now, the silence is both a refuge and a prison. He wonders, sometimes, if the peace he sought is simply the absence of expectation, or if it is something more fragile, like hope veiled in shadow.

He had unraveled quietly over time. The collapse didn’t come with a headline. Just sleepless nights. Mornings that arrived like accusations. The quiet terror of being alone with a mind that no longer obeyed. There was no single moment, just a slow loosening, like threads slipping from a seam. What once felt manageable became impossible to name. There were still meetings, still dinners, still jokes made at the right times, but behind each gesture was the growing sense that he was performing a version of himself he no longer recognized.

He started forgetting small things: names, appointments, what day it was. Then larger things, why he’d walked into a room, what he’d meant to say. It wasn’t memory loss, exactly. More like his thoughts had stopped arriving in complete sentences. They frayed at the ends. Fell apart under their own weight. He stopped reaching out. Not out of malice, but because conversation had begun to feel like translation, slow, exhausting, imprecise.

Eventually, he stopped pretending he was holding it together and left. Not with a dramatic exit or a final conversation, but with a quiet, private decision to leave. Not forever. Not necessarily. But long enough to stop being witnessed. To step out of view, like slipping behind a curtain. It felt, in a strange way, like mercy for everyone, including himself.

He rented a small cabin on the edge of nowhere, where the trees thinned and the horizon stretched in quiet lines. No one had pointed it out, no recommendation or reason; it was simply there, tucked away where the world seemed to pause. He arrived with a single bag, nothing carefully chosen, just enough to exist for a few days.

Mornings were slow. He wandered along the dirt path behind the cabin, listening to the rustle of leaves and the distant call of birds. Sometimes, he sat by the creek, skipping stones or watching the sunlight bend on the water. There was no urgency, no checklist, no need to impress. Mistakes or idleness felt natural, even welcome.

Evenings brought the quiet hum of a wood stove and the smell of damp earth from the window left ajar. A small leather notebook sat open on the table, its pages mostly blank, except for the occasional line that didn’t matter much. The solitude wasn’t dramatic or purposeful, it simply existed. There were no lessons, no revelations. Only the gentle rhythm of breathing in a room that asked nothing in return.

And in that emptiness, he felt a strange steadiness. Not clarity, not transformation, but a rare kind of trust in the calm, a quiet satisfaction in simply being, where the world felt paused long enough to notice it.

He carried that quiet forward. What began as a retreat became a way of living, and the “cabin years,” as he began to call them, led him here, to a forgotten golf course on the edge of a small town silent and isolated. That was five years ago and now he tends to this place. No one knows who he was before, and no one asks. Most days, he prefers it that way. The role is simple and predictable. There is comfort in the repetition. Trim. Water. Rake. Rest.

In his pocket is the small leather notebook. Each day, one sentence, that’s the rule. Not to be profound, just to be honest. Today’s reads:

“The silence feels heavier when it’s kind.”

It’s nearly noon when he sees her. A woman in a gray jacket, hair tucked back, standing alone by the 9th tee. She isn’t holding clubs. No golf shoes. Just a small tin canister in her hand. The air around her feels different. Still. As if the breeze itself is pausing in respect. Thomas approaches slowly, instinctively quieter than usual, as though stepping into a sacred space. The trees sway gently behind her, casting lattice shadows across the grass.

He doesn’t speak right away. The weight of the moment presses quietly against his chest, a familiar ache he thought he’d left behind. Her presence pulls something from the depths, a ghost of old wounds, a memory wrapped in a tight silence. It is the kind of stillness that suggests ceremony without audience. She holds the canister not like an object of utility, but like a symbol whose meaning is not immediately accessible to others. A life turning inward. An event collapsing into gesture.

 She stands composed yet precarious, like someone balancing on the edge of a thought too large to name. And he, instinctively, does not intrude. There’s nothing to fix here, and perhaps nothing even to understand. Only to observe with a kind of reverent ignorance. It occurs to him, not for the first time, how often silence carries more moral weight than speech. That empathy, at its most honest, may have nothing to do with comprehension, and everything to do with restraint.

“You okay?” he asks, voice low, not pressing.

His own words surprise him. A tremor of wanting to bridge the distance yet knowing some gaps are too wide. He waits, unsure if she wants to reply, or just the quiet company of someone who listens. She looks up. Her eyes are rimmed with red, but dry, not from neglecting to cry, but from having exhausted the utility of it.

She was tired in that specific way grief can age a person overnight, softening the edges of their face while hollowing out the space behind their expression. She meets his gaze without urgency, without fear, and yet with the unmistakable weight of someone who has been carrying a conversation silently within herself for hours, maybe days, and is only now deciding which part of it to let out.

There’s no drama in her expression, only the settled quiet of a person who has traveled through something and emerged, not whole, but intact enough to speak. When she does, it’s gently, like someone careful not to disturb something sanctified, not just in the world around her, but within herself, as if even her voice might cause the moment to splinter if handled too carelessly. Each word arrives as if passed through a narrow filter incapable of fully pushing out what needs to be said, the way people speak when they’ve rehearsed a sentence dozens of times and still aren’t sure it’s the right one.

“Yeah, sorry,” she says softly. “He used to come here… my father. I just wanted to leave something behind.”

She stood with a trembling stillness, fingers tightening briefly on the canister, eyes flicking toward Thomas as if silently asking for permission before letting the wind carry what she held. Thomas nods, a quiet recognition in his eyes. There is no need for explanation. He doesn’t ask her name. Doesn’t offer his. Their shared silence is the kind that doesn’t demand to be filled.

They stand like that for a moment, two strangers linked by something too quiet to name. Then she steps forward. She opens the canister and lets the wind take the ashes. The soft whoosh of the release mingled with the rustling leaves, and for a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath, waiting, watching. This was more than a simple gesture; it was a sacred rite, a farewell whispered to the past and a quiet hope cast toward what was yet to come.

A fine gray veil dances upward, then disperses over the green like mist meeting the morning sun. No speech. No sobbing. Just an offering.

Before she leaves, she sets a book down on the bench beside the tee box. “He used to read this. I never did. Maybe someone else will.”

When she’s gone, he walks over. Works of Love, Kierkegaard. He almost laughs. Of course.

That night, he reads a single page. The words sting. They bring up old things. Not memories exactly, but textures of memory. The way his apartment once smelled after long nights of writing. The glare of his laptop screen at 3 a.m.

He remembers waking, already sinking, the room still dim as early morning light slipped through the living room window. His chest would carry the weight of a full day’s regret. The blanket twisted around his legs like an accusation. His laptop lay on the floor beside the couch, its screen still exposed as if it had something to say back to him. He would pick it up without looking. He knew what was written. The same spirals. The same clawing toward honesty, only to recoil at the sound of his voice. The same shame that arrives not from the writing itself, but from daring to think the words matter.

He remembers the voice that whispered, “Who do you think you are?”, a taunt he still carries in the quiet moments. He once believed that beneath the polished surface, he could find something real. But when he caught his reflection in a dark window, the face staring back was a mask, behind it, nothing but empty space. He longed for a crack in that mask, a glimpse of truth that might let light in, but all he found was silence.

He remembers the pub. The philosophical debates that turned into performances. Words traded like currency, cleverness masking confusion.

“There’s no such thing as a clean life. Only a clean conscience. And even that’s just PR for the self.” Everyone laughed. But even then, he had felt hollow.

They never “talked” philosophy; they would perform it. Trading depth for style, epiphanies for punchlines… He remembers once catching his reflection in a dark window, a face that looked amused, engaged, maybe even wise. But inside, he felt hollow. Not broken. Just far away from himself.

The book slips from his lap. He turns off the light.

The next morning, he wakes heavy. Not depressed. Just reluctant. The kind of mood that makes you question the point of everything before you even sit up. But the body moves from habit. Teeth brushed. Shirt pulled on. Boots laced.

He steps outside. And the sun hits his face.

Without meaning or metaphor, no sudden revelation, just light and warmth where he hadn’t expected it. He stops walking. His eyes close.

“There it is. That is it.” He thinks to himself.

For a moment, he forgets he hadn’t wanted to be awake at all. His eyes close, not in surrender, but in acceptance. He breathes, not deeply, not dramatically, just enough. Enough to feel the air move. Enough to notice it. The warmth isn’t salvation. It isn’t an answer. It won’t fix anything or make the silence any less vast. But it feels like permission. To rest. To remain. To be, if only for now. He lets the heat soak into his skin like a quiet apology from the day itself. For a second, he forgets he hadn’t wanted to be awake.

He walks the field. Dew underfoot. The mower hums somewhere in the distance, a dull growl fading in and out with the breeze. The grass brushes against his shoes, leaving wet arcs behind him that disappear as quickly as they’re made. From behind him, a flag flutters once, a sudden snap of fabric tugged by wind, then stillness again. The quiet settles deep. No voices. No footsteps. Just the hush of morning holding its shape.

Today’s sentence: There are no clean lines. Only steady hands.