We'll All Have a Year of Good Fate

Or, on gambling, going, and the things we carry with us

I’ve neither had any inclination nor money to gamble with in my life, but I’ve always understood the act as though it is sacred, a religion I have learned of but take no literal part in. The week I turned six and my father turned thirty-seven, Mom packed the whole car and the new baby and my grandparents did the same and we all went to a small house in Florida, discounted for the off season. There I got very ill, and instead of being able to go in the water, I laid inside on a towel by the sliding glass door and slept with the sun on my face. Quietly, my parents lamented that this all was a huge waste of money. One evening, my grandmother poured her glass of wine and said she wanted to go gambling: “Really Kris, what if I get lucky?” Mom rolled her eyes and said “You won’t.”

I was raised not to believe in luck, something inherently nonchristian. God’s plan subverted the idea of chance, equating to a lack of any possible luck. It was all cute to talk about, but nothing substantial. A few years after the trip to Florida, my grandparents went on a cruise to Italy during which my grandmother won several thousand dollars in casinos. As I grew up, vacations in the off season became a fact of life that I held dear yet puzzled over; luck became something I simultaneously believed I had hereditarily, and wanted desperately. 

My freshman year of college centered around ancient Greek literature beginning with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These texts acted as my introductions to the fates, which I became intrigued by, as well as the idea of fate as a whole–both the entity and the entitic. To a degree I suppose this is, depending on how you look at it, some example of God or its antithesis, but really I just fell in love with the idea of whatever happened to me being divinely chosen, divinely fought over, and ultimately, divinely out of control of any party attempting to mess with it–whether that be man or God or god or sea monster.

During winter break of that year, I sat in my high school bedroom for the first time since I’d left it and picked out a simple tune on the guitar, wrote lyrics and called the whole thing (perhaps comically, considering the fact that I’d only been attending school for four months) A Year of Good Fate. All during that semester, I had been writing love songs I no longer recall to a girl who I no longer talk to, but coming back to the place I had been raised in after four months of learning what I felt must be Everything, I felt the need to write just one thing that was more for myself–my new life, my new best friend that I had recently met and started a small, short lived two-girl band with. I still play this song on instinct when I pick up a guitar, and the first verse, the one that rotates itself through me as though it is venal, goes as follows:

I’ve lived many a year on accident boulevard,
But I've had a year of good fate: 
Held joy in a room that could only hold little,
When love called I tried to make space.
There've been people I've hurt, people I've wanted,
Loud neighbors upstairs, girls next door who play bass.
The drum beats too loud to sleep some nights in Naptown
But I've had a year of good fate.

I don’t know why this is the song that I remember from that year, though I’m grateful that it is. There’s something about it to me–almost so wishful it’s silly. A whole year of good fate? Sure. As I look through my life I can point out no solid, one-year span of time during which I fell grace to explicitly good fate. Nevertheless, each month starts fresh–sometimes each day–and I think this is it. This starts my year of good fate, and I truly believe it as though it is something I’ve worked up to my entire life, some calculated, practiced luck that I can count and touch and take practice in. The version of me I wrote the song about has grown substantially but is still delusionally hopeful, and recently acquired an apartment with the other girl I wrote the song about. We have a lot of fun. 

Before this, before I had my own room, before I had my own space, I occupied whichever ones I felt could hold me. In April of my sophomore year, my eyes began dilating in the dormitory building in which I lived. The circumstances surrounding my discomfort were out of my control–some awful anniversary, some year of some fate–but I was starting to see the worst events of my life playing over and over like a movie everywhere I went. I was, for lack of better phrasing, going crazy. I needed something large. 

I told no one: I boarded a bus at 5am to get on another bus at 3pm that crashed in Jersey City to get to a poetry festival in New York. This sounds like an adventure. Even now, it’s a party story I’ll drunkenly recall. I walked out of my building that morning and thought “today I’m going to get in a bus accident,” and did, and that’s crazy because really, who gets in bus accidents? Am I insanely lucky, insanely unlucky? Maybe just a really good guesser. Either way, as if it had all been an omen, the two days that followed were some of the sweetest of my life. 

After the accident, I was afraid to leave New York. I had to leave New York. I had school. The friend whom I was visiting bought me a ticket with a different bus line. “There, now you can’t crash.” I was no longer anxious, but still I sobbed on the way out of the city, away from my luck: mouth open, forehead against the cool window, same one song on repeat until I hit Pittsburgh.

Each place I have traveled I carry with me like a pocket. If I stand very still, I feel the sun radiating from the window as I slept sickly as a child. My favorite poem I heard in New York was called Porch Swing, it begins with the line “And to have come this way for nothing.” I think of these words constantly, much like my song from freshman year: floating in my head as I speak, as I walk, as I learn, as I travel, and still I cannot fathom how to take them. The author describes returning to her childhood home after the death of her father–is this the way that she traveled for nothing? All this way and he’s gone? Or is it the opposite, her going so far away from here once just to end up back in a most pivotal moment? Which was her fate? It is almost ironic that I heard this poem when I did, on the trip I was on. I’d like to feel certain my expeditions are necessary, but my mind cannot wrap around that as the ultimate truth. Honestly, do I leave for nothing? Do I acquire experience for nothing? Have I come back for nothing to this same place, these same problems? Is it all that there is? Is it all I’ll keep doing?

Barely a month after I returned from my weekend of good fate, my grandmother was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. It’s essentially a death sentence without knowledge of where the punctuation falls. I don’t talk about it much. I don’t think I know how to. I haven’t been a very good granddaughter since this event, though I can’t say I was stellar before either. My grandmother and I aren’t close, though we should be. She was an editor, a writer, a reader long before I was and I regret knowing little about this. Sometimes I get the intention to attempt rectification, but it never pans out. At this point, I don’t know how to start trying. I don’t know why I don’t know how to talk to my own family, but it feels like a tightrope that will snap if I even try to step on it. Either way, it seems that cancer is a gamble in and of itself, and Mom says that my grandmother worships it in every single opposite extreme. She buys pearls and luxury coats and guided journals and essential oils. She takes pills and does chemo and drinks organic orange juice until it makes her throat turn on her. Anything to make herself better, even if it could make everything worse.

Someday, in any universe, I want to look at my grandmother’s face as I knew it before and say that I get it now, at least as much as I possibly can. I know why we went to the beach in the off season, why we went or go anywhere at all: because maybe we’ll go somewhere and see everything. Because maybe we’ll go somewhere and see nothing. Because these are our odyssies, our fates, and what if they're good ones? Because it all happens so fast. Because I’m bored. Because you’re bored. Because I’m twenty-one and I know in a year I won’t be. Because we could get sick. Because we could get better. Because there’s everything to do in between. Because we might get lucky on a gamble. Because we might get lucky. Because we might.

---

Less-Necessary-Than-Usual Postscript:

Double content in March, as promised. <3 I’ve been tinkering with this one for a while and it’s still not Finished-finished, but it’s enough of a Decent Draft that I want opinions on it. Let me know what you think!

When I wrote A Year of Good Fate (the song), there were three original verses. Since then, I’ve added to it, each time being one of great significance, though I only know that in retrospect. To answer the question, yes, it’s where my substack name comes from (….and my myriad of other social medias, but like, not in a narcissistic way I swear.) I’m adding the full song below, not because I think I’m any kind of musician (I am not) but because I think it adds a bit of completeness to the piece that isn’t entirely necessary to its being, but you’re here, right? So why not?

I've lived many a year on accident boulevard,
But I've had a year of good fate: 
Held joy in a room that could only hold little,
When love called I tried to make space.
There've been people I've hurt, people I've wanted,
Loud neighbors upstairs, girls next door who play bass.
The drum beats too loud to sleep some nights in Naptown
But I've had a year of good fate.

So draw me a picture of all of my lucky:
Write out my fortune in a heart paper chain.
I'll turn myself blind to maps I once followed,
Tattoo my arms with everyone's names.
I'll never forget, tell myself sternly,
I came from someplace where my cup runneth red.
Streets are too wet to walk mornings in Naptown
They spill out a year of good fate.

So spin out a web of three thousand endings,
All of which I could have picked and been fine;
Places I once thought life would be perfect
Just cause I didn't know what I could find,
Then if the chain breaks, our paper hearts crumple,
I love you. I'm happy we met when we did.
There's never a day I'll go lonely in Naptown,
For I've had a year of good fate. (Dec. 2022)

I walk down the streets that I once found familiar,
Searching for sparkles of what I once held.
My palms come of vacant, eyes are an ocean,
No mirrors for miles, the churchyard it grows.
So I tack up a map and follow things blindly,
The feeling is present: I might be too late.
But I'm young, won't forget it. Town's filled with tenacity,
And it's still a year of good fate. (Jul. 2023)

As we carve out our fortunes and buy off the real estate,
Lost in the move is the wonder we had.
The city feels smaller, walked every square inch of it.
The restaurants are closing, the budgets look bad.
We're all that we've got now, but more than we've ever been,
Someday we'll find pictures and miss this old place.
And the sun will come out again. Winter will end soon.
We'll try more for a year of good fate. (Aug. 2024)

All my love. Winter fragment dump soon, and then it’s April and the sun will come out.

X- Ri