I am a foreigner in a distant land who wishes to no longer be labeled as one. In order to keep their eyes off of me, I have abandoned all aspects of my old life, and accepted in its entirety what surrounds me.
I have chosen a suitable candidate to study and adapt towards. A golden brown haired man, freshly shaven, with a hefty frame. He lives a typical life, fitting perfectly to the one you would expect a middle-aged local to live, residing in an apartment overflowing with booze that can be smelled from across the street. He drinks from the moment he enters his apartment till the alcohol level in his blood surpasses the threshold, and collapses onto the floor. Every night, he obsessively stares at a wooden frame. His eyes only drift when his glass has run dry, and he heads into the kitchen to refill it. He doesn’t bring the bottle into the living room with him, hoping the glass will be his last of the night. It never is.
He has a regular routine that he does every morning in the exact same order. He snoozes the alarm on his bedside table twice before getting up, and heads into the bathroom. Unfortunately I have no clear view inside, so I can’t say for certain what he does there. I presume he urinates, and brushes his teeth upon washing his hands thoroughly with soap and water. That would be a fitting thing for an ordinary local man such as himself to do first thing in the morning.
I once again set eyes on him as he opens the bathroom door. Though I must say he took longer today than usual. I hope he is well. He did drink excessively yesterday, but then again, when does he not. Over the course of the past few weeks I have seen him empty a dozen bottles of liquor, ironically a very local thing to do.
He walks over to the kitchen and opens his refrigerator door, only to find a can of sardines along with an expired tub of yogurt. They have been sitting there ever since I’ve met him.
He works in a building overlooking all others in the vicinity, twenty two floors if I’m not mistaken. He arrives in his striped navy blue suit, with a dark blue tie. It is always the same suit. He likely has multiple pairs of the same combination, and doesn’t simply wear the same worn outfit to work every day of the week. That is a highly efficient system that would save precious time. By not having to decide his attire everyday, he is able to sleep for longer, and be more energized for whatever he may be doing in that skyscraper of his.
Unlike the past months he has snoozed his alarm more than twice. By the fourth time, he had yanked it out into the living room. It lay there torn off into a thousand shards of glass, that lay inside layers of crumbled plastic. Despite the beams of the scorching hot sun, he was drowning in his blankets, rising steadily till it covered him entirely.
I hurled a nearby rock at his bedroom window, adjacent to the bed he was being suffocated in. This surely got his attention, as he flung himself out of bed, grabbed his pistol, and aimed it at me. Yet it wasn’t until he had secured the wooden frame that he reached for the gun.
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