There is and has been a lot of guff on the web about how someone looks as a metric for their success when it comes to dealing with the opposite or similar sex. I can say this is false. You see, I lost part of my ear in the New Dallas conflict. I have not had cosmetic surgery done to fix my wide nose, or remedy the perpetual frown marks on my forehead and mouth despite much encouragement to do so. I am not a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination, yet I have encountered women. Women being my particular cocktail.
The thing is I am cursed. Lucky in life, but lost in love. I am not making this up either. This is not a self-diagnosed malignancy that I put on a dating profile. This is something I know as fact. Early on I entertained the assumption that I would meet someone and that I would find a way for love to love me back, but I tell you, I’ve done it all been back and forth and I am cursed.
Once I went out into the wilderness to seek out a witch. Roll your eyes all you want, but I found her. She wasn’t one of those ‘bathe in baby’s blood’ witches. She lived in a home and had a car, though it was covered in religious relics, and she offered me coffee when I arrived. But, she did live in the wilderness and she was a witch. We sat and we spoke for some time and then she stopped speaking and closed her eyes. I also went silent as I had an ingrained habit of not speaking unless spoken to. This went on for some time until she held her hand out to me. I considered what she might want and settled on my necklace. I pulled it over my head and coiled it into her hand. Her fingers closed over it and she moaned. Now this is not some sex novel bullshit. She moaned. She moaned as if the earth had travelled upwards through the soles of her feet and had imbued her with the knowledge of my own demise.
It was a lucky guess and happened to be true. She looked at me with the pain of one hundred years and she spoke, “you are lucky at life, sir, but unlucky at love.”
That was it. A simple diagnosis. At the time I smiled and laughed and when the witch had soaked up enough of the earth’s pain she opened her eyes and she laughed and grinned with me. You see, being lucky at life is a blessing, but your goddamned mind always wants you to be lucky at love. Your heart wants you to be lucky at love. But, when you are a soldier and a fighter and a gambler it pays to be lucky at life.
I speak to you now older and aged. I have seen red hair turn gray and then fall away to nothingness. I have seen the old republics die and have seen planets and space and found my way back here. I lived where others should die and I do not resent that fact, but the whole time this happened I dreamed and wanted love. I wanted someone to pluck me from the vine of life I reside and imbue in me their love and love them back for it, but it has never come.
Now I am alone. Truly. It’s not so bad either. I have my bar and I tend to it as I would a lover. Sometimes neglectful, but always quick to remedy that. I meet new people each day and their stories fill my life now. I have been lucky in life. So much so, that I won this bar and the life that I have now from certain doom, I won it. However, let me tell you, if you can be lucky at love, please give into it. Because it seems lovely and brilliant in ways that being lucky in life simply does not extend.
The Lunar Speakeasy 