Outside, the sky was painted a sickly, gloomy pigment, a nasty desaturated greyish-green that seemed to add a hopeless cinematic filter to the world. Rain pounded the roof of my house and lightning illuminated the firmament at scary, erratic intervals. The storm had been going on for at least three hours, and had no potential of letting up anytime soon. Looking out the window at Mother Nature’s intensity, I thought about the night I met McKinley. It was raining horribly then, thunder echoing, and now it had circled back around to remind me of her. The universe had a tendency to be cruel.

Whatever the case, whether it was a divine intervention or just the weather, conditions were favorable for just lounging around indoors and doing absolutely nothing. I plopped down on my couch to watch the news, and the first ad that came on screen was for Friendly Flippers; I instantly thought about McKinley. During one of our nights together, she had told me that she interned there and was helping children. When she told me that, it endeared her to me even more because I knew then that she had a good heart and a kind spirit.

For a second, I was hoping to see her on screen, but I doubted I would. She only worked there on and off, so she more than likely wouldn’t get any camera time. But ,then, towards the end of the advertisement, a familiar sounding voiceover started talking and it made my heart stop beating for a second.

“My name is McKinley Clarke,” she said in a smart and confident tone. “And I am a junior marine researcher here at Friendly Flippers.” The commercial dissolved from a clip of a little girl happily riding a dolphin next to a young woman in the pool with her. It was McKinley.

There was no way I could escape her, whether it was a thunderous reminder from the sky, or a commercial on TV. She was not going to leave my mind any time soon. I was… in love with her. And it was time to finally admit that to myself. I still wanted to be with McKinley. I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it.

I got up off the couch and ran to my hallway closet to put my jacket on. I was going to go see McKinley and make everything right, explain to her why I did what I did, and how I truly felt about her. I just hoped she would be willing and to listen to what I had to say. Then my mind drifted backwards in time; I saw myself standing in the living room, telling her that there was someone else, that one phrase replaying over and over in my head, reverberating off the corners of my skull. Then my perspective shifted to hers, standing there looking at the man she thought cared about her, being told all of those horrible things. As those moments repeated in a tortuous loop, I felt whatever little grasp I had on McKinley, if any at all, slowly ebbing away.

If I didn’t fix this now, she was going to vanish into nothingness. I grabbed my keys, and darted out the front door, not even caring to lock it. I felt like I was on an impossible mission; there was a bomb on the brink of exploding and I needed to go diffuse it.

As I got on the road and sped down Rotterdam Avenue, I brainstormed how to approach this, which wires to cut and which ones to leave intact. A traffic light stopped me, and I got irritated, but I used the fifteen seconds I had at the light, precious, critical time, to figure out what I was going to say to her. The red light transformed to green, and I shot around the corner.

I didn’t care what I had to do. I was going to fix this…

I was going to fix everything.