Main Character Vibes

Breakfast food at night

Seven blocks in the opposite direction from where Elias was actualizing his dream cityscape with Angie, Francis was ambivalently deviating from his typical commute home. Usually, he would walk for three blocks east of his office building. Then he would take the train all the way to the station outside of the downtown core to the Pickering, Ontario terminal, where his parked car would be waiting for him. From there he would drive in rush hour traffic for thirty minutes before he would finally reach his house. Although Marie's office building was two blocks away from his, she would normally tell him that she needed to remain in the office to work late. Naturally, Francis would need to be home for the kids.

However, having called his sister to babysit the kids for him earlier in the day, Francis was still lingering in the downtown core. The darkening streets of the city were in the after-work hours of beyond what his comfort was proving to endure. Francis was cautiously walking in the wet and windy streets, tugging his head surreptitiously in between the raised lapels of his coat while maintaining a perpetual shoulder shrug.

He was not accustomed to remaining this late in the city. To a man whose attitude was a reflection of a little house on the prairie, he could only breath easily around the placidity of wide suburban lawns and family-friendly trees. The metropolis was not the lively center of the universe that younger people advertised it to be. To him, it was like a desolate bubble drifting in isolation beyond the dark edges of deep space...barely touched by the light of a familiar sun.

Everything was making him uneasy...the forlorn dusk that was crowded by the towering buildings seemed like it needed room to breathe...the acid rain that seemed to be tainted with pollution was caustically making everything murkier... the friendless metropolitan creatures of the night who were slowly coming to life... the eerie orange glare of street lamps hazily glowing behind the clouds of frost that he was puffing... the rowdy loudness of traffic that was rude and unlike the quietness of his suburban neighborhood...the fast pace of it all.

But more so than from the unsettling setting, Francis was drifting in the perturbing wake of what Elias had told him earlier during lunch.

"Passion needs reviving every now and then," kept haunting his mind;

Francis was eagerly planning to take Marie out to a place that he was certain she liked; after all, he was not a gambling man – a quaint little gem of a diner hidden amongst the giant towers and other downtown buildings. According to the latest food blogs and tourist reviews, it served the best fresh battered pancakes and everything omelets in the city. There was something charming about having breakfast food at night.

After walking furtively for a few blocks, Francis finally reached the building where Marie's office was – a lofty tower not unlike the rest of the downtown towers swarmed around it. Even though he had visited Marie at her office a handful of times before, Francis stood hesitantly at the grand entrance of the building.

Having forgotten which floor Marie's office was located on, he was confounded by the countless banks of elevators and the intricacies of various ways to reach different blocks of the tower. Exasperated by the needless complexity of modernity, he stood there by the elevators scratching his head and struggling to remember his way around this labyrinth of a building. He elected to head back towards the reception in the lobby to ask the seemingly bored and jaded security guard.

As the security guard pointed in the distance at the elevators that he should be taking, Francis turned his head slowly and followed his finger. Suddenly, he spotted Marie coming out of those same elevators.

She was walking briskly in her fitted raincoat while carrying her stowed-away umbrella. Francis's heart fluttered with excitement upon seeing his wife.