When I left Indianapolis, I didn’t slam the door behind me—I just walked out quietly. I didn’t owe anyone an explanation. I didn’t give my landlord a forwarding address. I left my job as a field technician with two weeks’ notice and zero fanfare. The only person who knew my plan was my sister, Carly, and even she thought I’d lost it.

“Jay, a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains?” she said over the phone, her voice trailing somewhere between concern and sarcasm. “You hate bugs. You cried over your last houseplant.”

She wasn’t wrong. But when you’re slowly becoming a ghost in your own life, you’ll try anything to feel real again. So I loaded up my 2005 Tacoma with tools, canned food, a water purifier, and every battered piece of who I used to be. The cabin had belonged to my grandfather, a man I barely knew and mostly remember as a stern figure in faded photographs. After he passed, no one touched the place. It sat like a forgotten thought, gathering dust and waiting for someone like me to run out of other ideas.

For the first couple of weeks, the silence was deafening.

No sirens. No buzzing phones. Just wind in the trees, the occasional owl, and the creak of the cabin settling under my weight. I chopped wood with blistered hands, learned to cook beans three different ways, and read books by headlamp until I forgot what day it was. I was alone. Finally. Gloriously alone.

Until the donkey showed up.

It was a Thursday. I only remember that because I was trying to follow a “chop wood every three days” schedule, and the math got weird. I was sitting on the front porch with a tin mug of instant coffee, watching fog cling to the trees like breath on glass. Then I saw movement on the ridge. Something brown. Low. Four-legged.