The gentle fox softly talks

For my second round in college, I studied biology and worked in a cadaver lab teaching anatomy. I lived in a very run-down house about a mile and a half from my lab and walked to school and work. The house smelled of questionable choices and mildew; it was overdue for demolition, but the rent was cheap. 

 

I shared this house with strangers masquerading as friends and tended a small garden routinely ransacked by rabbits and hungry homeless. On the weekends, I fixed windows and rekeyed locks at a hardware store; sometimes, I installed wood floors and toiled as a handyman doing odd jobs for bars and clubs downtown. 

 

My schedule was chaotic between the lab, side hustles, and school. Pulling weeds and failing to eat the carrots I grew was my calm. 

 

At this time in my life, I did not drive. I biked or rode the bus, but I walked more often than not.

 

Walking gave me a lot of time in my head, which was not always pleasant. I dwelled on the past, rewrote my losses, and dreamed about missed opportunities. None of it was healthy or helped me find a version of myself that I could be content with. 

 

Living inside your head too much blurs reality, coupled with self-induced sleep deprivation, made for a very skewed perspective.

 

I wasn't depressed, but I wasn't happy. I wandered through my days directionless but often on time, present but seldom engaged. I loved teaching and studying science but knew it was a momentary reprieve from growing up and finding a real career. It was like an intermission in a play that I never wanted to go to, but attended to be polite.

 

I often wandered home after dark when I would teach late classes. On lucky nights, a gentle fox would keep pace with me from the edge of the campus to my front door. They were cautious initially, but I  calmly spoke to this furry spectator as if to entice the company. They became comfortable with me once they understood that I was harmless and relaxed with them.

 

People always surrounded me, day in and day out. Still, I was beyond lonely at this point—lonely in a crowded bar, bus, classroom, or lab, lost in the middle of a lousy movie that put style before story and passive participation before plot.

 

But never on lucky nights when a companion walked me home who happened to be an exceptional listener and asked for nothing in return. I didn't feel lamenting, lost, or lonely.

 

I told my housemates about the fox a couple of weeks into our promenades, once I was sure it was not a fluke or something my less-than-healthy brain was fabricating. They teased me and called bull shit, but a couple of nights later, one of them recanted, stating that they had seen me talking and walking with a very real and definitely not made-up fox. They said they knew I was telling a story because I was flapping my hands around as I often do when I teach or talk. 

 

One of my high school friends used to say that the only way to keep me from speaking was to duct tape my hands to the table; they were probably not wrong.

 

These walks continued with the fox on and off for the better part of three years, which could have been their whole life. They had chosen to spend a good chunk of it walking with an extraordinary and often animated weirdo.

 

What started to happen, though, when walking with the fox and talking to it about my life is that I stopped trying to rewrite the parts that broke my heart and focused more on writing their part of our conversation. "It is slightly healthier than talking to yourself," or at least that's what I often scripted my Volpine companion to quip when moments of self-depreciation would creep in.

 

I stopped living in days gone by that I couldn't change, stopped pinning for the ones that got away, and stopped winning the fights I walked away from. I started taking the fox's sound advice. Speaking through them, I was able to carve out parts of myself that I could tolerate and, with work, could grow to like.

 

The fox found value in blunder and wisdom in defeat; where I saw only failure, they saw the opportunity for growth. 

 

Still, to this day, I fob this off with a pleasant rationalization that the fox probably liked the marauding bunnies that desolated my garden. Or, if I don't think it will cause the listener distress, I cite the fact that I genuinely smelt like death from work as my undeniable allure. A sweetheart friend later told me it was because I have a gentle soul, and animals pick up on that.

 

 

 It may be six of one or half a dozen of the other.

 

I want to believe the sweetheart; I want to feel like that is something the fox would have told me during our walks, shortly followed by, "Your rabbits are also quite delicious. Keep planting bait."

 

I still think about my gentle fox and often miss our evening walks. Now that I am older, unlike before, I would ramble less and listen more.