Luck and Other Luxuries
If it doesn’t fit in your palm, maybe it’s not lucky.
I don’t believe in luck, or at least I try not to. Of course, I give in and look for a new source of hope but not without putting up a fight. It’s the last resort. You know how it goes; you know it like the back of your hands. If you give in now and believe that luck is driving anything at all, that little ominous chitter will pull you in. (I don’t always realise when I’m being too cryptic.) It’s that voice that says: You got lucky.
Wait, that didn’t sound grim enough. You got lucky, and next time, they will know.
Dun-dun-dun.
I want to be lucky enough to feel lucky and not feel bad about it. Guilt-free luck: like Stevia for the soul or a long thoughtful email with a very low-carbon footprint because it was actually a personally delivered, hand-written letter. Wouldn’t you want that? That very pure feeling of crediting yourself for something that you did do, but with a cherry on top.
I’m not saying I’m not lucky, but I want to feel it without that feeling unravelling new feelings of doubt. I spend all my days scribbling things, figuring out how to finish sentences that were written in a different time (and state of mind), saying “…that might actually work” and following that up by knocking on wood.
Okay, so I now have newfound clarity on the above sentence, and it kind of looks like the only thing I would want more than the whole Stevia-letter-guilt thingy is to avoid bad luck. Lorde-forbid, I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and some bird-poop just misses my head. I knew I should’ve stayed at home and finished that sentence or, at the very least, punctuated it. Maybe that isn’t so bad, but there exist little moments of misfortune that sort of stain everything in the same way that dirt gets on your light blue jeans on a rainy day. If only you could cross these puddles the way you consistently miss (not skip) that step while running down the stairs, out of the building, and across the road, only to have another bus-driver close the doors on your nose.
The weight of bad-luck (at least for the lucky ones) has been reduced to minor inconveniences, and the concept of luck itself is just so buy-one-get-one, if you know what I mean. Good or bad, you never want to be the understudy in your own story. Accepting that you missed your bus because you woke up late, for example: tough luck but you still played the dashing hero (quite literally) for the first 10 minutes of your day.
So, yes, sometimes you might need that charm or ritual to act as that beacon to guide species of the avian persuasion to the source of that ominous chitter.