The Exile Who Remained

A vert short story about a man who was sentenced to exile because he faced too much reality

The Exile Who Remained

I once knew a man who had been exiled from a kingdom for the cardinal crime of feeling too much reality.  But, in his stubbornness, he’d refused to leave, and nothing within the kings power could force him, for he was at heart a free man.  And free men set no limits upon the amount of reality they can face.  So, instead of exile, the king decreed that his status was to be lowered to that of a barely-tolerated citizen, and thus he was to be ignored and left alone to live out his days.  No longer embraced by his neighbours, he found himself existing on the edge of society.   And his countrymen continued their lives without him, whilst he celebrated his freedom in isolation,  and as the days stretched out to fill the space of years this man became almost forgotten.
Initially he was at peace in his circumstances.  He told himself that it was he, in fact, who had rejected the kingdom, and not the other way around.  And he continued his days in relative solitude, barely visited by any except the most loyal of friends.  He was content to remain a bystander to the affairs of the kingdom, having no voice and no right to cast a vote.  
But, over time, the reality of his circumstances began to take a heavy toll on him, and the only way he found to endure his sentence was to invite a numbness to enter into his once free and sensitive self.  And as the years continued to stretch themselves out, this growing numbness, and its inevitable consequences, changed him beyond recognition.  At the same time, those same rigours of time whittled down the numbers of his loyal friends, leaving but few who would support him as he struggled in the numbness of his solitude, unable as he was to feel the reality he once did.  And this man, who was once so proud and stubborn in his sense of self, became such a pale shadow of who he once was, that even the king himself could no longer see that this was indeed the man who’d once defied him, by committing the cardinal crime of feeling too much reality.