Do have a cave, a place to go, an escape...when you're done caring?

The rain came down in flowing sheets, bending in the light cast by the drowning fire. The rocks surrounding the pit took on a shiny glaze, the slickness of them cool to his touch. He gathered up his cooking tins and walked back up towards the cave. The path that led there was ripe with vegetation; ferns, tangled bunches of cherry-red sumac bushes, and the occasional struggling maple that hung its tiny branches across the clearing. He absently brushed away the thick, rich green as he neared the opening to his home of 2 years. A place he called home not by want, but through will. When the world had become too deep with sorrow and the shallow thinking of men, he came to this place in the woods to begin again, to cleanse himself of the filth he felt teeming through his pores and into his blood, choking the layers of his heart, turning his soul black with indifference. He wanted so much to care for the people around him. The strangers in line at the grocery store, the woman who served him coffee each morning, the children who crossed his street every day, bags full of books, the day's history perched in their eyes, eyes that absorbed it all, not knowing, not learning what it was to care. But caring became an intolerable chore for him.

He once watched a man die in his pick-up truck in the middle of a downtown intersection. The man lay slumped towards the passenger seat, his head gaping and oblong from its collision with the windshield. He stood as close as he could to the truck without touching it. A woman crawled from her hatchback clutching a cell phone, her hands punching at the numbers, her words garbled and broken by the shape of her new mouth. People were screaming all around him, yelling at the man in the truck to talk to them, tell them his name, tell them where he was hurt. A siren blew its warning in the stale city air, the sound carrying from 10 blocks south of the accident. He knew the man was dead. He stood, still, as a slew of people brushed against him, physically moving him out of the way. He stood planted where they put him, staring into the gash that glass had carved in the dead man's head. The rush of emotion, confusion, fear, panic, sorrow, frustration; none of these came as he watched the dead man in the truck. He set down his briefcase near the front tire of the hatchback and walked the 4 blocks back to his apartment. A robin skipped towards a fountain in the park and he smiled at it, waving to it as he whistled a tune he could not remember hearing before.

Now, as he lay back on the cold dirt bed of the cave, he cried until the rain stopped, a rain that lasted for hours, the sun breaking the fall of its drops when it pushed through the trees on the horizon. The opening to the cave had been a curtain of water that rolled into the mud cracks and flowed silently down the ravine into the forest floor. A breeze filtered through to him, cooling him as he slept. His dreams were broken by the wind through the cave, a wind that brought with it every memory of his past, the images of his life dancing through the darkness.