Lucky Me

It's a mindset, right?

Beginners Luck

It is a lifetime ago that I stick my fingers through the cage in a pet store to greet a cat, Lucky, who nuzzles her nose against my fingertips. I return the next day with $300 cash, because I need her like my life depends on it.

At home, I sit on the bathroom floor as she hides as far behind the toilet as she can fit. When we let her out a few days later she explores the apartment tentatively, but keeps her distance from us.

It is October; it is November. This little cat is terrified of everything.

One day, she naps next to me on the couch, but when I wake, she flees. We know she likes bacon, and that she’s obsessed with Cheetos. We don’t know what happened during the first year of her life, or how to make her feel safe.

I fly to Spain as the new year begins, leaving Lucky in Brooklyn with the man I love.

Luck of The Draw

I am someone else when I am assigned a psychiatrist at the Day Treatment Program I attend for five months. I’m 18, and I don’t know that I will see this psychiatrist for eight years. The Day Program is mostly group therapy with some DBT thrown in. I hate everyone in my group and fantasize about terrible things happening to them. I’m required to attend two substance abuse groups a week. I’m required to eat lunch in the hospital, process my discomfort around it on a scale from one to ten. But this psychiatrist, she sees me as something that will take me another decade to see in myself. She tells me that she will hold out hope for me because I cannot.

In Spain I talk to her weekly, in a small park near my apartment. I do not worry about being overheard because nobody speaks English in the city where I live. I am miserable. Lonely in a way I never have been before. All the time I’m not at work, I’m alone.

I travel places I’ve always wanted to go. But I do it alone. And when I travel, I’m ok. In motion, I’m ok. It’s when I stop. Try to sleep in my tiny, tiny room, on sheets that smell too strongly of detergent, on a bed that once literally collapsed in the middle of the night. I’m still me, even in Spain, even in London, or Paris, or Florence.

Try My Luck

When did I stop being the person I used to be? Who will I be when I stop being what I am now? What is my potential? I’ve never been one to gamble, but I’m betting it all on myself.

Lucky Charm

You don’t fuck with charms like I do. You don’t fuck with trinkets, blessed and cursed. I have a bowl of treasure on my mantle in a pomegranate bowl from the city of Granada. Inside:

• Dried turkey tail mushroom

• Oyster shell. From which ocean?

• Stone, smooth and vaguely heart-shaped. From Lent a few years ago

• Pink beach badge that I was supposed to return to my grandmother at the end of summer 2023 but kept purposefully as a memento, the beginning of the end

• Tiny plastic lion, given to me by my current therapist

• Chestnut, picked from the ground of the cemetery as a good omen

• Pressed penny with a mermaid on it. Pressed in Surf City, NJ

• Button that says Re: Joyce

• Paddington Bear 50 pence coin, given to me by a not-boyfriend, on our second date

• Chocolate coin, gold. From a childhood friend who doesn’t like chocolate, with the stipulation that her coworker didn’t like it. I told her that I was not going to eat it, but save it forever

• Porcelain owl. Origin unknown, but identical to the figurines that used to come in my grandparents’ tea boxes

• Puzzle piece from mania round one when I stole some of the pieces from all the puzzles in the psych ward

• Gibbets given to me by the children I work with. A butterfly that is actually quite nice. Another one that says Wow!

• Sugar Packet from Granada, Spain. ¿Te ha pasado alguna vez que estás buscando un lápiz y lo tienes en la mano? Pues algo similar ocurre con la felicidad.

Tough Luck

I’ve started wearing a ring to sleep because I think it might protect me in my dreams, and I’m not willing to take the risk of taking it off. The ring is from Turkey and probably cursed, though I’ve cleansed it with smoke before. I feel that my intrusion as an American visiting these places that would be better off without me warrants a curse on the ring.

But the curse seems more general than that, honestly.

The man at the cafetería writes his number on a piece of paper and drops it on my table like something in a movie. But when I text him, he is not flirtatious but crude. I make the novice error of begging someone to respect my boundaries. Tengo un novio. My Spanish lacks subtlety, but he’s not being subtle. I’m so desperate for connection, but this man makes my stomach turn. I text my Spanish friend in Granada to see if all men are like this in Spain. She says: He sounds like a… como se dice… fuc boi. I never walk past that cafetería again, take the long way to work. It’s a real shame because they have the best churros y chocolate in the city.

Lucky Break

It is night when I fly in from Madrid. My dad picks me up at the airport, and as we drive back our exit is closed, and so is the next one. I’m crying because I think I’ll never make it home.

And when I walk in the door I kiss the man I’d loved. But it is Lucky who runs in circles in excitement. She zooms over the bed, out the bedroom door, around the living room, back into the bedroom and onto the bed. Happy is not the word I would use. Frenzied. Confused. Overwhelmed. I am the ghost of the girl who left. I am someone else entirely.

I break up with my psychiatrist when she won’t test me for ADHD. She is treating me like an addict when what I am is dysfunctional. I storm out of her office one day, never look back. It is difficult to find a replacement psychiatrist as my supply of medication dwindles. This instability, lack of care, tanks me. The bottom drops out. The virus spreads.

And of course the man leaves. All that self depreciation and hatred stewing. I’d been alone for months but hadn’t learned to like myself. How could he?

Lucky Me

Sometimes, as I write, Lucky is in a near-catatonic state. Her eyes, halfway open, she rests her chin on my thigh. Other times she’s really fucking annoying. Walking in circles around my laptop, rubbing her cheek on the corner before making another loop and kneading her paws into my thigh. Currently this scaredy cat is curled up between me and the computer. I stretch my arms around her, struggle to type. And then a truck hits a speed bump outside, and her ears perk up. She is gone. But she has not gone far, and she sits and she listens. I always think she is here to protect me, though she’s so dumb, it must be coming from instinct and intuition rather than a courageous choice.

For the first few days we called her Cat. The plan had been to name her either Alligator (Allie for short) or Esther. Cowering behind the toilet bowl, she did not seem like either. I named her Luna because she looks like a moon. Not our moon, but there’s got to be a moon out there somewhere in the Universe.

She is more of a comet. The path is elliptical and she does not like to be near me all the time. She is gorgeous. The most beautiful cat I’ve ever seen. But she is so dumb. She seems to be motivated most by fear and hunger. Though she also demands my attention. She weighs less than ten pounds, but her gravity, it pulls my tides.