Under the Stars and Stripes (Under Him)

Selecting five outfits and random, I blind chose two and then flipped a coin. Alexander McQueen sans tie it was. I even had a matching pair of sunglasses that would look pretty cool even though I was going to be wearing them mostly on my head. Our date wasn’t for hours yet, but still I liked to be prepared. I did have the fullest sash in Boy Scouts after all.

Taking a moment to pause, I could not help but muse on how odd and wonderful life could be. I had been given a chance to correct the greatest mistake of my life and it really had come out of nowhere, blindsiding me on the morning of an idle Tuesday. My mind very much on other things, not considering for a minute that I might get a second chance with Ada.

She could have slapped me or screamed, or worse, ignored me all together, but she didn’t. It was a sure indication that she still felt the same way I did. The kiss was the final proof if any more was needed. While my life to that point had been good, giving me the opportunity to do everything I had ever wanted to do, it had still felt incomplete. With even the chance to have Ada in my life again, it felt as though I had been reborn.

I was early of course. Punctuality was a family trait that had been beaten into us, at times literally, by the earlier generation. My parents opted for the non-violent approach. My mom’s knock out punch was saying that she was disappointed. I could probably have handled a violent rage better than that.

To see her look down and shake her head, like she was sad to be related to me, made me die a little each time. Which was why the times were so few. Such a response was reserved for only the most severe of infractions which I knew full well I wasn’t supposed to do. Those instances stopped entirely when I was about ten.

I looked over the menu, marvelling at the selection of meat. I wasn’t a militant vegan or anything. I was more of an omnivore, proceeding to eat a bit from all four food groups, so there were alternatives to meat that could be had. I also philosophically didn’t like the idea of eating something that hadn’t done anything to me. Eating the flesh of the slain was usually reserved for one’s strongest and most bitter enemies. I had a difficult time imagining cows or pigs in such a situation. Chickens, on the other hand, were a lot craftier than they looked.

I flipped the menu closed, partly so I could read the name on the front to make sure I was, indeed at the right restaurant. I really needn’t have worried. The name was right, and the time was still technically wrong. Ada had ten minutes to spare in order to be right on time. One of the disadvantages to being routinely punctual was that so few other people were, which could cause a lot of stress, particularly for one as naturally fastidious as I.

It might sound cliché, but here too, I blame my parents. Both of them academics and life-long Atheists of the absurdists school, I had been taught that in a universe where nothing we do matters in the grand scheme of things, where mortal lives were but a fleck in the eye of eternity, the only thing that mattered on a mortal level was what we did.

As such, I should endeavour to always do the very best I could to make my otherwise meaningless existence, in the most literal sense of the word, count for something. If nothing else than making life better for my fellow foolish mortals. It made sense to me at the time and was the principle by which I attempted to live the rest of my life. It was surprisingly easy to hold a standard that you consistently fail to live up to. The important thing was that you try.

This was my dad’s position, in any case. I tried very hard to ignore the fact that following this advice was what had led me to breaking it off with Ada in the first place. I genuinely believed that it would be better for both of us. I looked down at the breadbasket, which had been brought to the table along with the menus and realized that I had managed to eat half of it without noticing.

“Kingsley?”

My eyes went up and quite nearly fell out of my head. Or at least that was how it felt. Gently as you please, beautiful Ada reached out a hand and softly closed my mouth which had dropped most of the way open.

“You like my dress, I see,” she smirked, sitting down across from me.