TYOV- Experience 6

 Prompt 25: What social mores have you forgotten?

[ Lose Skill "Carving Wood is Fun" entirely. Experience added to Memory 1, "My Life". Memory 1 is now full.]

My time out here in the woods continues like this. I travel out to find food, store it in my larder and keep them fresh long enough to allow me to eat them in my own time. Time passes slowly, like mud. I can feel myself trudging through it but I find it impossible to tell my progress. 

Cwenhild stops coming by. At first I'm not sure why, but looking back I can guess. I hadn't even noticed the effect time had been having, while it was as mud to me it was an unstoppable river for everyone else. Little Kenric too. He kept visiting, bringing me gossip and goods and eventually his own children to visit. Then he stopped visiting. The people of my life vanished just like the semblance of civilization I was trying to maintain.

I can't tell if one thing started another or the other way around, but with the people I cared about vanishing I stopped bothering to maintain what you could call my new home. The furniture didn't last, such at it was, hacked into shape with my fathers old knife. After that vanished in the bushes I stopped bothering to repair my furniture, or even make new ones at all. Didn't seem worth it.

People who I assume would be Cwenhilds grandchildren, now all grown up, still visit, but they don't stay as long as she did, or their father. They bring me some simple bits and pieces and I suppose check I'm still here, and in return I continue to keep bandits and marauders away. I'm not sure what they make of me now though. Going from Cwenhilds friend in the woods to a thing that crawls out of its cave at night, eats its screaming pray off the floor and dumps some small tokens of riches in a pile for the visitors to pick up. Am I as a wild animal to them they tolerate? We don't exactly speak about it. Speak at all in fact. 

I wouldn't know what to say to these people who are practically strangers, who's faces remind me so much of my best friend. Their faces taunt me, I'll hear a note in one of their voices or part of an expression and be reminded of my life on the farm. 

I'd rather not speak to them at all, really.

So here I continue, living as a beast. My belongings from home are gone, my knife, my lute. But pretending to be a man who lives hiding from sight like this, well I find no joy in bothering to maintain things like furniture for guests I don't like talking to. If nothing else, I doubt I even remember what a chair is meant to look like! Let alone how to ply my crude craft to making it. 

I still have some of those little figures though. Some are damaged, with water or rot or just hard wear from the elements, and those I do mourn too. Carving them was a nice reminder of who I was, and right now I'm not sure if I could remember how to do that, either.