11.5 Parsecs
Just cause I’m near a black hole
doesn’t mean I’m heading for it.
People have said what I do isn’t noble.
Those people are ignorant.
They’ve never worked at Red Robin, they’ve never seen the waiting benches overflowing on Easter Sunday, and they’ve sure as hell never been out of fry seasoning during a little league championship celebration with only one server on the clock. That server was me — the lone rebel pilot.
I’ll be honest, I never wanted to work in a restaurant. I barely like eating in them — all those other people touching my food. That’s why I hold my hands way away from the entrees when I serve them, even if that sometimes means dropping the plates — I know how the people want it. I’m hard and fast, I run a tight ship and I will kill to stay at the top. This isn’t Chic-Fil-A — we’re in tip territory.
Anyway, I had always wanted to be a fighter pilot. I remember watching Star Wars, and asking my dad if the Rebel Alliance was a real thing.
“Didn’t you read the opening scroll?” he would ask. I guess those jobs only used to exist. But when I found out the Air Force did basically the same thing — just within the earth’s atmosphere — I wondered why my dad hadn’t just told me about that. He was always a man of absolutes, like a Sith — he told me a man never offered more information than the dummy talking to him was able to pull out, and I guess growing up that dummy was me.
So anyway, I knew that if I was going to raise money to go to fighter pilot college I was going to have to get a civilian job first — one that used me for my ability to carry and stack trays, not mid-air combat. This was ok, because a lot of times maneuvering steaming hot food through a crowded restaurant felt like Han making the Kessel Run, the second time when he beat BoShek’s record with Luke. Not that BoShek’s record really counted — he wasn’t even carrying cargo.
I was always carrying cargo. Not just the plates and stuff. Things like Annie the hostess that spent the night with me sometimes, or my dad’s feelings about space fights. It all kinda sunk there in the hull; sometimes I thought it was getting heavier somehow.
Like I said, a lot of people are ignorant.
They look at me piloting their food to them and think, well there’s just another guy living paycheck to paycheck, not going anywhere. But just cause I’m near a black hole doesn’t mean I’m heading for it. Sometimes it just means you’re taking a shortcut. I can already see something there on the other side — 11.5 parsecs away.
