Life had been strange.

Life had been strange since the divorce. For Michael, adjusting to living alone for the first time in twenty years was proving a slow and up hill task. For the majority of his adult life he had had someone to talk to, to get frustrated with, to visit his grandmothers house with, to love and to lust. From college roommates to countless affairs to his wife of fourteen years, Michael had rarely been alone with his thoughts and dreams. Now his nights were spent on an uncomfortably creaking single bed, his mornings spent locked in a struggle to prepare for work, manoeuvring around his green tiled cell of a bathroom with a shower designed for a small person who doesn't worry too much about hygiene. His evenings are spent alone, listening to the radio, drinking beer.


The annoying ring of the ever depressing alarm clock, a gift from his then wife, woke Michael like a freight train crashing through the stingy, frosted glass window of his apartment. Punching the tormenting device to the ground, he rolls over with a groan that isn't too dissimilar to a dying hippopotamus.


Physically, Michael is slim, or perhaps thin, tall, with thick dark hair, long strands that are constantly swept off his glasses and sometimes stick to his forehead when pressed. Two week stubble has emerged around his neck and chin. A quick glance from a passer by would probably judge him as normal and healthy, or somewhere in the middle. However, with a recent rise in his alcohol and tobacco intake with the state of his increasingly stressed mind, and unwashed clothes worn for weeks on end, Michael is anything but healthy. On closer inspection he perhaps portrayed an ageing out of luck, down in the dumps artist with financial problems and an ex wife. Most of this was true, but Michael was no artist, he worked for his local newspaper, had done for eight years. But like his living space, his work space had become stale to him.