Somewhere around 1995, someone gave me a pink umbrella. There’s a photo of me holding it above my head in a house I can just about remember, and my mother showed it to me a few weeks ago. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m maybe four or five years old, I can tell because I don’t yet have the obvious weight of the eldest child. I was wearing a pink, purple and blue raincoat in front of a coffee coloured tile fireplace, and it looks like someone’s dropped me in there from somewhere else entirely. I did not match the vibe.
Stood there with a horse printed on my pocket and an umbrella in the air, I didn’t even understand the concept of bad luck.
Everything in this picture was very wrong.
My mother is deeply suspicious so I’m surprised she even let this happen in her own house. She raised me to leap over pavement cracks and keep my mirrors intact. She never took a risk that had a superstition attached to it.
We never tempted the universe, because if you gave it an inch it sure as hell would take a mile in return. Fate had a funny sense of humour.
I know I have privilege. I have shelter and food and every luxury that a thirty something with an okay salary can afford. Things like heated blankets and scented candles. I have things. And I love things. Things give me comfort.
Look, on paper I’ve lived a decent life. I get that, I have a lot more than others and maybe my suffering is just equilibrium doing its thing. Sometimes it just feels like it’s one thing after another. Bad things come in threes, unless you’re someone like me.
I miss my therapist, who used to validate my experiences and reassure me that my pain was real. He’d tell me I’d suffered too many times at the hands of others.
You name it, I most likely have some sort of experience with it. Sexual assault, abuse and defamation are the first to come to mind. I’ve loved animals that didn’t live very long and tried to resurrect a few dying things. I’ve witnessed several bankruptcies, had to buy my parents house when I didn’t even have one myself, and shoulder the weight of open secrets. I’ve dealt with mental health conditions and eating disorders. I’ve had shit jobs and friends. The latter is something I’ve taken control over, for the most part. I try to improve what I can.
I’ve just had some rotten luck, to be honest.
Like when I broke my ankle in three places, had surgery and then lost my job because of it two weeks later. Or when the dog I rescued almost killed me, and the partner I had for almost five years left me to go on holiday to Budapest with another woman.
Waving sage through the house might help clear the air, and I’ll leave my crystals under the moon just incase they do something for me for once. I need to do something, other than look at the sky and make shapes out of the clouds.
Maybe talking to the dead will give me some answers. They’ll explain my curses and catastrophes.
Our family knows bad luck, this much is true. We mostly know how to deal with it.
With drained bank accounts and bad genes, we’ve never had luck on our side. Misfortune was passed down like a glass heirloom, and nobody ever tried to break it just to see if it would. I wonder who was the first to carry it.
Did they get what they deserved?
Did they trespass through old tombs or disturb sacred ground? Maybe they tainted holy water or maybe they dug up violet diamonds in mines, and called it hope.
Like anyone else, I’ve tested my luck from time to time. I’ve crossed the road when I shouldn’t and used milk when it’s past its best. I’ve tried to prove I’m not so cursed.
Most of us have bought losing lottery tickets and made useless bets. I’m not alone in being unlucky in that regard. Friends of mine can win hundreds of pounds on a quick payday gamble, but mine always come at a loss. Some people can eat whatever they want without worrying about a scale, or at least eat the recommended daily allowance. Not me, I’ve never been built that way. Weight has always been stubborn and mean.
I think about my family a lot. After lifetimes spent of avoiding stepping on cracks, we broke our backs anyway from carrying this curse for all this time. Perhaps we deserved it, and I don’t know if that’s worse or not.
Grinning and bearing it is a family trait, and I’ve come from a line of people who just keep going. Somewhere in the past is a parade of women in pain and men dressed by misfortune, both of them just carrying on because it was the only option they had.
Generational curses in particular present themselves addictions to substances and betrayal, they come dressed as deceit and dysfunctional cycles. The eldest child is usually the one to clock the pattern and try to break it, but believe me I’ve tried. Trouble has found me even when I went no contact with it.
When my fingers push down my throat, I wonder if someone else put them there to begin with. No, that one is my own fault. It is a weakness from an unkind life. I can’t blame everything on this damn curse, I have things to answer for.
We can’t choose our battles sometimes, even if we want to. I’d have preferred a gentle curse like an endless sleep, but I spend my nights twisting and turning until I can force myself to pass out.
Mostly, I’ve done all the things I’m supposed to do when I need to counteract my luck. I’ve touched wood and counted lucky pennies in my pocket. I’ve thrown copper in fountains and crossed my fingers.
A long time ago, I searched a field for four leaf clovers in the sun with my grandmother, and she made me keep trying even though I could never find one. She didn’t want me to lose hope, I was just a little girl after all. I should have known then I’d never win the lottery or have nine lives to waste.
Sometimes everything feels like a punishment from my past lives.
Did I steal bread from the poor or lie to a lover? Did I bite an apple in cursed gardens? Maybe I pissed off a witch or two in my time. Although I doubt that last one, because I love witches.
People are always looking for a reason. We look for an invisible force in the clouds, or try to see men hiding in the sky. We hold prayer beads and light white candles. It’s easier to believe in divine intervention and misfortune by design. It’s more comforting than the truth. Life is just cruel and it doesn’t matter how much you earn your way and settle your debts, we pay the price until the end.
Things get better but it’s a matter of time before they go wrong again. Some people say that’s life, but why are some people born more charmed than others?
In my dreams I’m cursed by chants and mirrors, haunted by rituals and time. I worry about possessed objects. Did I inherit the Necklace of Harmonia, or perhaps stare into a black scrying mirror?
It could easily be the latter, as I foreshadow so many of my own tragedies. I’ve seen my own death more times than I can count. They call it anxiety and it usually is. I’m still alive after all.
There’s a little bit of Cassandra in me, I always complain that no one believes me. I’ve got a great track record of telling the truth, but it doesn’t matter. I see futures and heartache, but nobody ever listens. It’s so frustrating to have a feeling and to have a sharp intuition. I sound sirens and ring warning bells to give them time to run, but I’m just called dramatic.
Some people just have a sixth sense or a third eye. They dream of deaths and decay. They can reach the departed and hear voices pleading all the way from purgatory. They can predict who you’ll love and who won’t love you back. They may just have the gift of ghosts and tarot.
My gift is stories, and I know how mine will end. I think my greatest torture is to be the generational curse breaker, the beloved, dramatic oracle who cannot change her fate no matter how many times she reroutes her path. I am the one who tries to beat the gods and let them laugh. No matter how many times I suffer and rise, there’s always more of my curse to go around. I just can’t get rid of it, it’s like a blood stain on my bedsheets.
My curse taunts me, it tells me to give it my best shot and I’m nothing if not competitive.
From somewhere in 1995, there is a photo of me that curls up around the corners. Someone should have told them to take that umbrella away before I had the chance to open it in the house. Breaking it might have even been a better option. Maybe one day I can break this curse free from my body, and snap it like a wishbone.