Order

Sometimes, he loved order.

The sounds of it were the best. A constant, confident clicking of dress shoes in a hallway. Other times, it was the comfort of a customer that walked in every Tuesday and ordered the same thing. You know the kind, he always takes half an hour to order and with a huff and puff settles on the same tea in the same size cup he’s had for three months. Order showed up in how the leaves always found their way to the ground. People thought it was random each year. He knew better. Order was sometimes patient, like honey oozing out of a bottle. Time had shown him that the inevitable is not always the immediate.

Thinking back, life had always been in the choking embrace of order. Class schedules during the day were followed by rifle practice at night. Mother and attempted fathers constantly picked him up, and dropped him off. Here, order was an iron cage. A place to think about his next move. As a side note, he now understood why executives probably loved being driven around. Order was as much a privilege as an oppressor.

Earthly struggles taught him the oppressive side of order. If something was first, it was at the expense of making somebody else second. Friends and classmates discussed how being second wasn’t that bad. They had never experienced the pain of order. They knew of the order that made sure their finances were always in order, not the order that earned him the cautious glance of every store owner. Order kept the traffic going while also making him tense up everytime a cop was behind him, thoughts of fates worse than a ticket in his mind. For some, order was the thing that kept airplanes on schedule. For him, order was what made his trip to the airport an hour longer than it should have been. Order loves the nickname “security” in these places.

On second thought, anarchy doesn’t seem so bad.