Jim

No one really knows Jim. People come to him for their problems. He is not the first choice for people who com looking for resolutions. He is good though. He works in a private office outside of Scranton. Every night he goes home to a condominium in a gated community.

He is alone. Not painfully alone. He is just alone. Many people would say that Jim is married to his job. He does not like that; he does not think that – usually. He does not want to think that psychology is his life. He certainly has outside interests; he just does not indulge in them as often as others might. Really, he is just like any other man that he has known. He is definitely charismatic and he definitely has all of the qualities any woman would admire in a man.

He has not been on a date in at least two years. He sometimes wonders that maybe he is married to his job.

Pam

Pam makes a name for herself. She is able to support herself through her art and frankly that is more than a lot of other artists in the area can say for themselves. She owns a small art gallery in downtown Scranton, and she also spends some time working at the art museum at the local university. She spends a lot of time around Lake Wallenpaupack on the weekends painting and sketching the natural world around her. She is always creating new works of art to sell so she can continue to pay the rent on her large apartment located on the top floor of a historic building in the downtown area. Her apartment is right above her art gallery.

She does not like to travel long distances anymore. She barely even travels outside of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area these days. She does not need anything the area cannot provide to her.

Pam is single. She has been single since the divorce that tore her away from Philadelphia.

Ryan

Ryan is that guy. You know…that guy. He is the guy that everyone knows about; the guy that is moderately successful, moderately attractive. All in all, Ryan is the average American male. Every morning, he wakes up, brushes his teeth, showers, combs his hair just the way he likes it, eats cereal and orange juice for breakfast then goes to work. When he comes home to his small, two-bedroom house in the evening he watches a little bit of The Simpsons – even though he has seen every episode more times that he can count, he heats up his dinner in the microwave or cooks on the stove if he’s feeling extra adventurous and finally he winds down the evening on his sofa with a cold one and a healthy dose of Law and Order before going off to bed.

He certainly is not unhappy with his life. Sure, it might be nice to have a woman to come home to every evening, maybe someone that could cook for him from time to time and a nice warm body to sleep with at night. He is not going to rush it though. He is happy with his job as an assistant manager with a local business and his job as a freelance writer on the side.

Maybe the girl would be nice after all. Maybe it is just what he needs in his life.

Karen

Karen is not from the area. She is a bit of a wallflower. She tends to drift around from town to town, waiting for the next gig; trying to find something that she actually enjoys doing.

Karen is an entertainer – at least that is what she calls herself to feel better about what she does those times that she is feeling a bit down. She has lived everywhere from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, from Buffalo to Albany; she even lived and worked for a brief, horrifying period of time in Atlantic City, New Jersey. How she decided to move to Scranton she would never figure it out. The living was fairly inexpensive and she had easily found a couple of jobs working at a local café, a local restaurant and then…well, then there was the club.

She is not very trusting. She cannot remember the last time that she used her actual name on anything other than her driver’s license or passport. Sometimes she wonders what her name used to be. She is so used to ‘Karen’ now.

Sometimes she wonders what she used to be…before this.