Every morning you could hear him down the hall…grinding beans for coffee…running water…coughing from a cigarette…and moving back and forth…pacing on the linoleum….talking to himself…carrying on full conversations…always about some woman…some woman who’d left him years ago…

He’d talk about her husband…how they’d carried on this affair for a long time without his knowledge…he was a salesman…always on the road…never knowing what his wife was up to…the whole thing was very hush hush…

And she’d change her hair color all the time…go from auburn to brunette…sometimes ash blonde…she was getting older…the gray was coming in…

So…he’d talk about her ever morning…making a racket in the kitchen down the hall…saying how a man can change over night…how life can change…you never see it coming…it just happens…just one day people move on…they tire of you…that’s what happened with her…she grew dissatisfied with her life…he was the one that found her…all stretched out on the bed…empty bottle of Trazadone on the night stand that her father had built her years ago…the lamp was turned off…

Kept mumbling…,why…,every morning…then he’d close his door and no sounds would come from him till the next day…just silence…quiet as a graveyard…but…mornings…he’d talk…