There is this man sitting on a camel colored leather couch in front of a giant flatscreen TV that hangs on a white wall. He has a computer in his lap and a cell phone next to him and an iPad sits on the round wooden coffee table. It looks as if someone has been carving into the coffee table, and there is really only one potential suspect for this, but another possibility is that this is the way the table has always looked.

Sometimes we look around a familiar room or even a neighborhood and see things we swear we’ve never seen before. Entire houses seem to have appeared overnight. We search for children who exist only in picture frames. Children who turned into something different and moved away.

But back to the man. He has information coming at him from at least six different directions. He looks down at the woven rug beneath his feet and remembers trying to return it because it was just a little more pink than he had anticipated. But then he got used to it, and the sun from the tall window faded all the colors anyway. The rug is worn down, fraying at the edges, and this is a little bit like the way the man feels. The hair on his temples has gone gray and he feels frayed at the edges. In fact, he feels like throwing any number of devices at the window or the wall or the TV.

He is doing everything he can to stay afloat, but one can only be a superhero for so long. The savings accounts look more like piggy banks full of enough coins to get you an ice cream cone, but not a life. The man runs his hands through his hair until it sticks straight up. Now he is frayed and frazzled, his appearance an apt metaphor for his inner turmoil. The man hates phrases like “inner turmoil” because to him they sound like psychobabble and do nothing to help the actual situation at hand. Which, at the moment, is the numbers that he is seeing on his screen.

There is no one else home. No one else lives there, though friends stop by from time to time to see if he needs help. Caregivers come to assist him with the body parts that no longer work. For a time, he could get around the house pretty easily, but then his legs gave out and he laid on the floor for an entire night wondering if there was any way he could reach the morphine and just drink all of it. He was picturing himself as a soldier, specifically an ally in the second world war, gunned down and dying slowly on foreign soil. But he could see the rug from where he had landed and it ruined the fantasy. Because being a dying soldier in the 1940s is the fantasy when the reality is being a man alone with a pink rug and a prognosis that no one would wish for. He is no hero, although he once thought he had it in him to be something special.

Maybe he could sell the rug. Maybe he could sell the house, but then where would he go? He’s too young for this. He refills his glass of wine; he has surrounded himself with everything he needs while the caregiver is on a break.

He thinks about his great-grandmother in a nursing home when he was just a kid. The nursing home terrified him. Old people terrified him. He wonders if that’s why he will never get to become one.

He looks out the window at the house next door, peeling green paint and a boarded up window that he swears he has never seen before.

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