Shooters Gotta Shoot

Faiza sits on a bench in her neighborhood park, reading a book. It is a picturesque spring day, and the park is packed with people. The weather is much too nice to be inside. But children are playing in the grass in front of her, so Faiza isn’t reading as quickly as she’d like.

In every group of children, there’s always that one child. That one obnoxious brat whose parents failed to teach them to not yell at the top of their lungs. Usually, the screeching is enough to drive Faiza to yell at children (in her head, of course) and judge the parents for iPad parenting instead of actually parenting. But not today. No, today is the first warm day, after a cold, bitter winter. Nothing can get to her today.

She looks up from her book, as one does from time to time, and sees a man walk by her. Their eyes meet for a moment. The man is a touch older than she is; he reminds her of the guy in those Capital One ads. Faiza thinks nothing of it and returns to her book.

About a minute later she looks up from her book again to see the man walking by her again. Déjà vu? Or did he circle back?

"Hey, on a scale of 1 to 10 how open are you to being hit on right now?" he asks. Faiza laughs. He's funny.
She can’t put her book away fast enough. "I'd say a solid 7."
"7 is good. May I sit? I don't want to punch down."
"Huh?"
"Small joke. I'm hitting on you while I'm standing and you're sitting down, punching down. It's funny," he says as he takes a seat on her park bench. Leaving plenty of room for her to have her space. What a gentleman! Faiza cannot help but smile.

"Have you always been so cavalier?" she asks.
"Hey! I'm here to hit on you, not the other way around!"

She can't stop laughing. 

"Does this work for you?"
"Does what work for me?"
"The whole hit on women in the park thing?"
"Sadly, it's not something I do consistently, but I have learned recently that if you see an opportunity, you need to take it."

"So, you haven't always been the 'pick up women in the park' guy?"
"Sadly, no."
"So why now?"
"I was simply moved beyond control by your beauty." Bullshit. 
"Oh c’mon, there’s no way this is the first time you've done something like this."

"Ugh, do we really have to get into it?"
"Aren't we supposed to be getting to know each other?"
"We're supposed to be flirting, there’s a difference...but fine."

Faiza stares the man down as he takes a deep breath. Here comes a big monologue, should I get him a soapbox?

"I think it all stems from the point that we are told to believe that we have all the time in the world. That things will come when they come, and that patience is a virtue. That all sounds very poetic and right but it's all just complete bullshit. We have no time."
"Excuse me?!"
"None. Zero. Zilch. Time is literally ticking away every second of every day. I had a friend, he was my best friend, we used to go out all the time, chasing chicks. He was very extroverted, almost to a fault. He was fearless, he talked to more women in one night than I would in a month. He didn't care. If a hot chick even pretended to look at him, he would be over there asking for her number within seconds. It was awesome to watch. Naturally, our other friends and I would ridicule him and laugh at him because he was constantly getting rejected and making a fool of himself. But we were just jealous. His response was always 'shooters gotta shoot.' That was his thing. He always took the shot. Always. He had no shame. He barely had thoughts. He was a shooter, so he shot. Then one day, poof, just like that he was gone."

Whoa, didn’t see that coming.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry you lost your friend."
"Me too. It made me realize I had wasted literally my entire life not shooting the shots that I was supposed to shoot. I mean really, we all go out, we leave our homes, read on park benches, go to coffee shops, go to bars, whatever. All for a chance to meet someone who might make us happy. We sip on those hope cocktails. But most of us never shoot our shots, thinking we will have all the time in the world to do it tomorrow. But tomorrow comes and you realize you still have all the insecurities you had yesterday and all you have done is waste yet another day. It sickens me to think about all the time I threw away going out but not really putting myself out there, ya know? Not shooting my shots. Because that is time I could have spent on other things, more productive things."

Faiza’s blown away by how real this mystery man is. "Wow. You've thought about this a lot."

"I have. And I always come back to the same conclusion: we have no time. We fool ourselves into thinking that we do, but we don't. So now if I see an opening, I shoot my shot. Shooters gotta shoot."

"You know, I have spent a lot of days like this sitting in this park. And in all that time I would say you are the first man to actually talk to me."
"Think about how much time the men that walk right by you wasted not shooting their shots and beating themselves up for it after."
"But you can't shoot every shot, can you? Like how do you get up the energy to do that?"
"Ah, now you've asked the magic question. I will tell you, but not now, on our first date. How's next Saturday?"

Wow, he's good.

"Wow, you're good."
"I've shot a lot of shots."
"It’s almost like you’re now being a shooter in your friend’s honor."
"Heh, yeah, I guess I am."
"Fine, I'll go on a date with you. But I need your name first."
"Give me your phone," the man says as he hands Faiza his.

They type in their info and swap the phones back. Faiza looks it over. His name is Sam Jones.

"All right then, I'll leave you to your reading, and I'll see you on Saturday, Faiza Jalfrezi." He pronounces it perfectly, like he’s read it 100 times before.

"Looking forward to it. Hey before you go, are you an actor? Are you in a Capital One commercial?"
"Uh…no, but I’ll take that as a compliment," Sam says with a smile as he gets up to leave.

He takes a few steps away before Faiza blurts out: “How did your friend pass?" Ugh, that was rude, shouldn’t have asked.

"Who?"
"The guy whose death inspired all of this?"
"Oh, he's not dead! It's far worse than that. He got married! I realized all this stuff about shooting your shot at his wedding!"

They burst out laughing as Sam makes his exit.

Faiza turns back to her book, then hesitates. What’s the point of this? Why am I bothering with this book? It’s not bad, sure. But isn’t this passive reading the exact waste of time he was talking about? I have a shot to shoot, so shoot it!

Faiza gets up from her bench to track down whoever’s responsible for that screeching, snot-nosed kid.

"Who is responsible for this child?!"