This is the continuation of 'A prompt a day keeps insanity away,' an old series of (excerpt from) short stories, written by me—this time inspired by random lyrics I found on the internet. I may not interpret the prompt the way it was meant to be, so get ready for a huge mess and enjoy reading.
prompt five: if it wasn't for bad luck // you know i wouldn't have no luck at all
Sometimes I wonder if she realized how much nonsense she's spewing. Being lucky should be a good thing, right? Knowing her, however, I bet the question didn't just come out of nowhere. Something must've irked her—and judging from the long, comfortable silence we previously shared in this 10'x10' bedroom—she must've been thinking about it for a while.
So I decided to jump right into her train of thought and ride along.
'It depends, I guess.' It really does. You see, luck is in a way similar to beauty. It all depends on the eye of the beholder. People say you're lucky for having or being able to do something, but in reality, you might feel otherwise. People feel lucky because they think so, not because they are. 'Why did you ask?'
'I was just... thinking.' For a moment there, she was just staring into space, looking for the right word to turn her jumbled thought into a coherent sentence. She was supposed to be folding her laundry, and I was supposed to be helping her. But that could wait.
'What's the opposite of luck?'
The opposite of luck? I tried to dig deeper into my lexicon and found unluck, bad luck—misfortune. But they're all negations, not a word of its own. Luck doesn't really have an opposite—unlike hot and cold, left and right, good and bad—which is probably why we got all these prefixes and adjectives in the first place.
'Bad luck...?' I finally uttered after a not-so-careful consideration.
And then she chuckled.
'See, there's good luck, and there's bad luck.' She sat up straight on the bed, her eyes sparkling with eagerness to elaborate. It's moments like this that made her feel alive. 'When we say someone's lucky, we usually mean that they have good luck. But think about it. People with bad luck should've been considered lucky, too. It's just that they got the wrong kind of luck.'
That's a rather weird but refreshing way to describe your misfortune. If that's the case, you never really run out of luck. You're just having too much of the wrong kind. It's like dodging a bullet only to fall to your death right after, finding some spare change in your back pocket only to realize that your wallet's missing.
'I... kind of see your point.' My hands reached out to take some of her clean shirts. 'I just don't get why we're even talking about it.'
'I don't know. You, figure it out.' She took some of the folded pants and a hoodie and got on her feet. As she walked away towards the door, she turned around with a witty smile painted on her face.
'Good luck.'
