A man is wandering aimlessly through endless aisles of frozen produce.
I have been watching him for hours.
I approach slowly and ask him what he is looking for.
He looks at me with despair in his eyes and says he doesn't know any more.
The fluorescent lights seem to flicker above me, and the stranger begins to speak.

He tells me that there was a man who didn't care about anything.
A man who had given up.
A man who read too many books when he was young and had spent his life waiting.
A man, who's expectations had been set so high; by stories about destiny, magic, and wonder, that he would always be disappointed with reality.

The man had developed hobbies and interests as a child - even passions, but as he grew older they began to seem trivial. Eventually, he gave up on everything and surrendered himself to doing nothing.

It sounded zen, but the stranger told me there was nothing mindful about it.
The man became mindless. Purposeless. He existed in his small flat, and that was enough. He worked from home and passed the time watching television. Every spare hour of every day was spent glued to the sofa, in front of the TV.

The man would watch whatever was on; game shows, cooking shows, dramas, blockbusters, cartoons, documentaries.
He didn't even care whether it was good or bad. It had become a pointless distraction from what he perceived to be a pointless existence.

The television was never switched off. He gravitated to the flickering light of the screen – like his ancestors, who once sought comfort around flames in the dark.

The man would often sleep in front of the television, wrapped in his sleeping bag like a worm. Sometimes he went for days without moving. He would wake up in a daze, wipe the dribble from his chin, change the channel and then go back to sleep. Sometimes this would go on for days and days until the man lost all sense of time.

One night, as he dozed in front of a week-long cooking show omnibus, a TV chef began to pan-fry scallops with a coriander garnish, and the gentle sound of sizzling butter filled the room. The man started to salivate in his sleep.

As the scallops began to caramelize, thick sticky dribble slowly ran down the man's chin, soaking into his shirt.

By the time the chef had started to de-glaze the pan, with zesty lime, the man had fallen into a deep sleep and continued to drool heavily. Imagery and sounds from the TV incepted his dreams and he slept through the night.
By morning he was drenched from head to toe in his own saliva.
Half asleep, half awake, his open mouth continued to drool as the culinary omnibus played on, and by noon he had completely drenched his sleeping bag.

As the sun began to set, the clear enzymic fluid hardened in the cool night air. Within a few hours, the man had become completely encased within a translucent shell.

For days he lay inside a silvery dribbly chrysalis, blissfully comatose, basking in the flickering glow of the television.

Only as the sun began to set on the fourth day – did he begin to stir.

Driven by instinct, in a lingering semi-conscious state the man flexes hard against his salivary cocoon. A soft crackling sound fills the room, and silvery pieces fall away, flaking gently onto the carpet.

The man emerges slowly, unfolding himself and crawling down onto the floor.

He begins to wave his arms. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster until a lamp crashes to the ground. A huge flapping sound fills the room and the man rises into the air.

In a frenzy, he starts to whirl around the room, smashing himself into the television over and over and over, leaving dusty grey residue smeared across the screen.

Last time I saw him, he was fluttering around a street lamp on the high street. Bathed in the deep orange glow he was beautiful. A moth the size of a man.