He sat quietly in his chair in front of his desk. He was busy. He worked at home. Nobody knew what he did. Nobody knew who he really was. It was only their assumption that this figure was even a “he”. One thing they knew was that he always had groceries waiting for him in front of his doorstep every morning. They never saw his face either, but a silhouette at night when the lights were on. There were too many things his neighbors wanted to know about him but he remained as a mystery. His non existence made him famous in the area. People wanted to see who his person really was, but that was impossible. He’d never left his spot.

          It had been almost ten years since he left his home. He wasn’t a prisoner and he was never forced. He was happy. He was happy because the house made him feel like he was a part of something, and he never wanted to lose that feeling after what he had experienced in the past.

           There was nothing wrong with the relationship he had with his mother. They weren’t the most loving of the kind, but they loved each other enough. At least he thought they did. The last time he saw his mother was a sunny day. Sunny days are supposed to represent happiness, or it gives the setting for a start to a normal day. That particular sunny day wasn’t happy or normal. It was a day of confusion and chaos.

He and his mother went for a walk in the park. He was 10, and she was a single mother. That day, she looked distracted and her grip felt stronger to his hand than usual. After few minutes of walking in silence, she told him to sit on the nearby bench and wait for her until she came back. Without a second thought, he innocently sat down as his mother briskly walked away. He stared at her back as she made her way to her mysterious destination. Her shoulders were slumped and she looked skinnier than he had remembered. Very little did he know at the time that he was the cause of the change in her figure. He thought about her some more, and he stared down at the shadow of the bench next to his feet. His mind drifted off to another subject. It drifted and drifted until he started day dreaming. A few minutes later, when he snapped back into reality, he realized that his mother had been gone for quite some time. No big deal he thought, and so he waited. He waited until the shadow of the bench was well past his feet. Maybe she’s running a little late he thought, but as time ticked on, he became more puzzled. Where was she? The fatigued back of his mother was the last thing he saw of her, and from that day, he never belonged to anyone.

His daily routine started off with check his front door step for his grocery bags. Since he never went outside, he had his things delivered. You could get all sorts of things delivered these days. He was thankful for that. After bringing his groceries in the house, he then went to his computer and started on his job. He had a heavy workload, but the job gave him the house, so he had no complaints. When he got a fair amount of his work done, he went to the kitchen to eat his breakfast. The dining table was big. Big enough for a middle sized family. He had been part of a family before, quite a few of them too. In the end, the once thing they had in common was that they left him in the end.

After he was abandoned by his mother, he was put into care with a few foster families. His experience with his mother left him to become paranoid about being left alone. His foster family eventually grew tired of his constant need for attention. As even foster families left him, his paranoia grew worse, and he gradually lost trust in others. He thought of humans as cruel animals that were incapable of feeling sympathy for others. He distanced himself from the rest of the world and decided to stand alone in his own.

That was the start to his attachment to the house. His house would never walk away from him. The house will always belong to him as long as he belonged to it. You are never to trust other people he thought. The most he did with trusting others was with that man who delivered his groceries. He sometimes worried that he might have to starve to death if the delivery man decided not to come. He recalled the time during the blizzard last year when his groceries weren’t at his doorstep for almost a week. Even the weather was hard to trust.

He wasn’t sure what his opinion was, on catching people starting at his house. He knew that he was talked about. He knew it because every time someone walked past his house, they either tried to look into his window, or whispered something to their friend. He even found little notes in his grocery bag asking him questions about his lifestyle. Some of them asked if he can let them in sometimes. It became one of his hobbies to read these short notes. Of course he never even considered meeting the people who wrote these notes. However these notes managed to change his opinion about other people. Maybe some people do care he thought. It didn’t make him want to meet them however, as he was still scared of possible rejection. He thought that he was too good for the imperfect world to have a piece of him, but in reality, he was scared that he would be rejected along with his own imperfections. Of course these thoughts stayed within the walls of the house. .