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Here is mine!

I stepped inside the door; cool, confident, not a hair out of place. Well, not except for the huge chunk that wasn’t long enough to reach my ponytail but that was beside the point. After all, it’s not what you wear, it’s how you wear it. Even if my hair was the ugliest mess this side of paradise, I could still look like a queen.

ANYWAYS, returning to where I was, the moment I got inside a wave of greasy, hamburger-y scent slapped me in the face. Oh yes. This is what I had been waiting for all day long. No more papers to write. No more assignments due. No more exams crying out to be taken. Everything faded away into the distance, passing the horizon and into a great beyond where the word “responsibilities” no longer existed. From this point on, it was just me and my lunch and overwhelming relief that the semester was over.

Sauntering up to the front, I found myself behind a guy with a huge mustache, a lady with two screaming kids, and a highschooler with rapid-text syndrome. Seriously. I mean, that kid could not get off the phone. He was texting when I stepped behind him and was still texting a few customers later when he got to the counter. I didn’t catch what he said for an order. Maybe he texted that to the cashier. Who knows? At any rate, he didn’t take to long in making a decision and scooted off pretty quick. Yay!

And now paradise was closer than ever. I couldn’t have looked at the exhausted cashier any more benevolently if she was a saint and me her guardian angel. She looked up at me (I’m tall. Like, really tall. The kind of tall that makes everyone ask if you play sports and gets old really fast) with deadness in her eyes, and I responded by offering a smile loaded with the light of sheer human delight in simply being allowed to exist in a place like this. The smell alone was amazing!

“I’ll have a number three combo,” I said, words spewing out of my mouth, “with a medium water.”

Silent-er than the grave, the cashier beeped up my order. “That’ll be $8.39,” she droned, clearly not appreciating my enthusiasm.

It was but the work of a second to produce my debit card. A few moments later, and paradise was mine. I clutched the paper bag closely, tenderly, as a mother might her firstborn child – before the kid gets loud and spoiled and demanding. Yech. But enough of that. This – this inspired gift was what life was meant to be about. A few more steps, I would be out the door and on my way to some secluded park bench, where a meal fit for the finest kings awaited me. Oh, this was going to be marvelous! I could barely control myself, what with all the chills shooting down my spine.

The door opened ahead of me, I took a step forward, lighter than air. Then it all vanished. A gaggle of students burst in the door, unmindful of their colleague (me) and barreled towards the counter – doubtless on the same mission as I had been. As she went by, a girl’s elbow shot out, catching the arm holding my bag. Tragically real laws of force and gravity were all it took for the bag to go flying. My hamburger hit the ground with a splat, burger and bun sliding across the tile in a condiment-covered mess. The fries went upwards, only to fall in a gentle shower over my head, from which the bounced onto the floor. The drink, well, that one was easier to predict. It, of course, went down the front of the short and soaked it.

I fell to my knees, bewailing my horrible fate. Paradise was no more.